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Your tastes aren't arbitrary - they evolved to regulate your dietary habits. The more that flavor cues deviate from their natural correlations with certain nutrients and poisons, the more poorly our powerfully evolved dietary regulators will fail.

This is in part why many people who have more than enough resources to feed themselves well are nevertheless malnourished. They are fooled by their bodies into thinking that they are feeding themselves appropriately, when in fact their diets only feel nourishing.

This latest technology only adds to the trouble. Eliminating the bad taste of things that taste bad is a naive solution to a non-problem. It's like the childish wish that doctors would find a cure for pain - sure pain sucks, but it's a crucial feedback mechanism that we can't do without.

See Gina Lunori's The Reasons for the Unexpected Difficulties of Modern Life for a more detailed discussion of why our efforts to hedonistically optimize the world come back to bite us.

A site I run (sniggle.net - formerly found at syntac.net) was removed from the wayback machine when the church of Scientology complained about an image of L. Ron Hubbard on one of the site's pages.

Now, not only all of the pages on my site, but all of the pages at syntac.net have vanished from the wayback machine.

Oh yeah, and they can't be found at Bibliotheca Alexandria either, so that's no solution.

Brewster's going to have to turn down his rhetoric about the wayback machine a bit until he gets the resources to fight back. Otherwise people might get the impression that he really is keeping the history of the web, even the parts of the web that entities like the church of Scientology don't like, alive.

You can bitch and moan about how advertisers won't be satisfied until they can interrupt your dreams and put luminescent logos on the inside of your eyelids, or you can do something about it.

Talk back! Or find some other way to Interrupt Pathological, Media-Simulated Social Interaction.

You can bitch and moan about how advertisers won't be satisfied until they can interrupt your dreams and put luminescent logos on the inside of your eyelids, or you can do something about it.

Talk back! Or find some other way to Interrupt Pathological, Media-Simulated Social Interaction.

You can bitch and moan about how advertisers won't be satisfied until they can interrupt your dreams and put luminescent logos on the inside of your eyelids, or you can do something about it.

Talk back! Or find some other way to Interrupt Pathological, Media-Simulated Social Interaction.

The highlights aren't vandalism of the spray paint and broken windows variety, but vandalism of a more artistic or pointed sort that often leaves the target looking better than before.

The really destructive vandalism, alas, is usually bought and paid-for, and protected by the powers-that-be. One way to reclaim private advertising in public places is to Convert Billboards to Chalkboards. This is one you can do in your spare time - hop to it!

The folks at Baby Smasher Industries will sell you some amended "instructions for use" stickers that show how restroom baby-changing stations are really meant to be population control devices.

The folks at Fortean Times have kept their fingers on the pulse of curious vandalism: Authorities in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, were called to the scene to investigate when fifteen trees in a city park were fitted with doorknobs and locks. Residents of a Rio de Janeiro slum painted all of the buildings in their neighborhood a uniform pale green, perhaps to confuse police.

In 1982, during the USSR-supported anti-Solidarity crackdown by the government in Poland, someone changed all of the signs at the “Stalingrad” metro station in Paris to read, instead, “Gdansk” (the city where the Solidarity movement was founded).

What would you do, given the inclination?

The highlights aren't vandalism of the spray paint and broken windows variety, but vandalism of a more artistic or pointed sort that often leaves the target looking better than before.

The really destructive vandalism, alas, is usually bought and paid-for, and protected by the powers-that-be. One way to reclaim private advertising in public places is to Convert Billboards to Chalkboards. This is one you can do in your spare time - hop to it!

The folks at Baby Smasher Industries will sell you some amended "instructions for use" stickers that show how restroom baby-changing stations are really meant to be population control devices.

The folks at Fortean Times have kept their fingers on the pulse of curious vandalism: Authorities in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, were called to the scene to investigate when fifteen trees in a city park were fitted with doorknobs and locks. Residents of a Rio de Janeiro slum painted all of the buildings in their neighborhood a uniform pale green, perhaps to confuse police.

In 1982, during the USSR-supported anti-Solidarity crackdown by the government in Poland, someone changed all of the signs at the “Stalingrad” metro station in Paris to read, instead, “Gdansk” (the city where the Solidarity movement was founded).

What would you do, given the inclination?

The highlights aren't vandalism of the spray paint and broken windows variety, but vandalism of a more artistic or pointed sort that often leaves the target looking better than before.

The really destructive vandalism, alas, is usually bought and paid-for, and protected by the powers-that-be. One way to reclaim private advertising in public places is to Convert Billboards to Chalkboards. This is one you can do in your spare time - hop to it!

The folks at Baby Smasher Industries will sell you some amended "instructions for use" stickers that show how restroom baby-changing stations are really meant to be population control devices.

The folks at Fortean Times have kept their fingers on the pulse of curious vandalism: Authorities in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, were called to the scene to investigate when fifteen trees in a city park were fitted with doorknobs and locks. Residents of a Rio de Janeiro slum painted all of the buildings in their neighborhood a uniform pale green, perhaps to confuse police.

In 1982, during the USSR-supported anti-Solidarity crackdown by the government in Poland, someone changed all of the signs at the “Stalingrad” metro station in Paris to read, instead, “Gdansk” (the city where the Solidarity movement was founded).

What would you do, given the inclination?

Obviously, this story was a fluff piece. Some fluff is okay, but as watchdogs of society and government, journalists should have more important things to do than give endless free publicity to inventors and their "secret" society-altering inventions, be they Jaskars, Segways, or Transmeta chips. Traditional news values are utterly predictable and easy to manipulate (e.g. "Arm the Homeless").

However, zero point energy, as far as I understand it, is one of those quantum weirdities that seem to defy Newtonian physics.

Cheap grab for box-office bucks? Hardly.

First, you assert rather blatantly and incorrectly that "movie-making is a business, of which entertainment is a by-product". Filmmaking is an artform. Hollywood is an industry which uses and very often abuses the artform in the pursuit of wealth. The establishment within Hollywood largely, but not exclusively, pursues films which cost less to make than they can probably be assumed to gross. The artform, then, often suffers, because marketing forces affect both the sort of films which are made, and frequently the way in which films are made.

Having clarified that, let us move on.

Filmmaking is an artform, and certain films are universally recognized as being fantastic works of art- regardless of the processes or powers that created them. You can not look at many of the masterpieces of modern cinema and pretend otherwise. Tell me, was "Taxi Driver" a cheap-grab for box-office bucks? "Citizen Kane"? "Sex, Lies and Videotape"? "Run Lola Run"? "This Is Spinal Tap"?

Few films are both artistic masterpieces and box-office blockbusters. Nevertheless, some films are, and it is elitist and cynical to be dismissive of high art that just happens to be popular and financially successful.

"The Matrix" is, regardless of your somewhat low-regard for the film, a true masterpiece of science-fiction. Yes, the creators of the film offhandedly said the "Matrix is about robots vs. kung fu". That comment was a humble, joking hypersimplification. Sorry if you missed that.

Do some reading. Consider Simulacra and Simulations for starters (a book which Neo has early in the film). Read up on Culture Jamming. There is a war underway, RIGHT NOW, for the control of the minds of mankind. "The Matrix" is a film which addresses that very subject- co-opting the form of a shoot-them-up-sci-fi-FX-supermovie in order to make a bigger point than most of you seem to have realized.

The 60s were a period of great civil unrest and cultural change. Many great films of the day reflected the social upheaval our nation experienced- touching on the subjects of the civil rights (for minorities and women), the counter-culture, etc.

As we speak, a new war rages- but it is a quiet war, an invisible one. The war is being waged by corporate interests, using media and advertising, to create and control a complete version of reality, one which allows them to encourage endless consumption and one that discourages them from questioning the reality. The rebellion is being fought by individuals and groups that realize that the consumption culture is creating empty shells of all of us. It is isolating us from family and community.

The rebellion has no leader- it has no center. It is a thousand small pockets of rebellion, each attempting to use novel means to awaken others to the war. Noteworthy authors include Thomas Frank (One Market Under God), Adbusters, Neil Postman ("The Disappearance of Childhood" and "Amusing Ourselves to Death"), Mark Osborn ("More" (a FANTASTIC short film)and so many, many others.

The film "The Matrix" is a part of this movement. It isn't just a cool sci-fi. Yes, the film is being marketed and used by the Producer Joel Silver to generate a serious mint. The system is necessarily co-opted to subsidize the creation of the expensive, incredibly complex work. Is this hypocritical? You decide. Do the ends justify the means? I would say yes. I'd rather see "The Matrix" realized as a $100M work than see what the Brothers would've been able to come up with using only the money they made painting houses and doing their first film, "Bound".

Watch the movie again with these facts in mind. Research the culture-jamming movement and read everything you can if you want to be a part of the fight. If you don't, at least be aware that it is being waged- and that you minds are the spoils if the powers win the war.

"Neo: I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid... afraid of us. You're afraid of change. I don't know the future. I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell how it's going to begin. I'm going to hang up this phone, and then show these people what you don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a world without you. A world without rules or controls, borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you."

A guy over at Kuro5hin wrote in "Marijuana, Mountain Dew and My MCSE":

I never intended to administer Microsoft SQL Server for a living. I quite literally fell into the field. One minute I was an unskilled high school dropout lifting boxes in a warehouse, and the next, I was a highly paid DBA. I have my MCSE to thank for this, and I have fate to thank for my MCSE.

We all knew that the same bland, vanilla-flavored crap was being pumped out on every channel. We knew that demographics dictated that the King Biscuit Flower Hour was going to be played on every freakin' station in the nation on weekends, while we were being fed pap by Journey, et. al. during the weekdays.

When people say that punk was a rebellion against boredom, and nothing more, they're missing the point. It was a rebellion against the media control addressed in the article.

In closing, I leave you with some words from the Dead Kennedys' historic performance at the Bammies.

Check it out! You could do it too, and on the cheap!
---

I hate to break it to you, but the only BLO hack was a social engineering one. No actual Barbies/GI Joes were actually hacked -- the entire thing was a hoax aided and abetted by a willing media who accepted the BLO video press releases without verifying the story.

It's too bad you didn't include a link to something verifying this info. A lot of fairly reputible sites contain BLO info and don't say anything about it being a fraud. These include www.syntac.net, www.everything2.com, and ®(TM)ark which claims to have funded the operation. (A quick Google search will turn up many, many more.)

Besides a couple of USENET postings, the only info I could find regarding the BLO being a myth was this article which says that the only myth is the myth of the incident being a myth.

Of course this is neither authoritative nor exhaustive and I'm sure we would all be wiser if you would reveal the source of your wisdom.

The proper messages in the proper community would be most entertaining...

Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/

Take a look at:

Luddism Index

For some examples of radical critiques of technology. A couple I'd recommend:

• Lessons from the Luddites by Kirkpatrick Sale
• The Reasons for the Unexpected Difficulties of Modern Life by Nancy Owlglass

Take a look at:

Luddism Index

For some examples of radical critiques of technology. A couple I'd recommend:

• Lessons from the Luddites by Kirkpatrick Sale
• The Reasons for the Unexpected Difficulties of Modern Life by Nancy Owlglass

• Stephen Weinberg, who posed as the U.S. Consul Delegate to Morocco, as a Serbian militia attaché, an American navy lieutenant, the envoy of the Queen of Romania, an army air corps lieutenant, a doctor (on several occasions), as head of protocol for the U.S. State Department, and (after serving some time for these put-ons) as an expert on prisons.
• George DuPre, who got his amazing story of being an intrepid World War II spy published by Readers Digest and by Random House books before he was discovered to be a phony.
• Ferdinand Waldo Demara, Jr., whose life was the basis for the movie The Great Impostor. He was a few doctors as well, and the assistant warden of a prison, and a surgeon in the Royal Canadian Navy, a schoolteacher, a college dean, and who knows what else. He is legendary for his ability to perform admirably whatever he was doing with whatever credentials he had assimilated.
• Steven Jay Russell who has taken the legal system for a ride by impersonating a judge, a lawyer and a doctor to talk his way out of custody. His trademark is to escape on Friday the 13th.
• William Voigt gets bonus points for putting on the uniform of a Prussian military officer in 1906 and using this ruse to gain the allegiance of a pack of soldiers, then raiding the treasury of Köpenick on the pretense of investigating tax irregularities.

It seems to have gone unmentioned, for the most part, that the Sunday Times is Britain's equivalent of the National Enquirer. This article is most probably utter bullshit, I mean THE Sunday Times has negotiated secretly for weeks to ensure the safe return ... ??? And don't forget the Sunday Times was also the rag that brought Britain the Hitler Diaries.

You Americans need to cultivate a healthy distrust of the media ;)

Nothing? Guess you should have checked out the Culture Jamming: Scams & Frauds page instead.

Nothing? Guess you should have checked out the Culture Jamming: Scams & Frauds page instead.

Nothing? Guess you should have checked out the Culture Jamming: Scams & Frauds page instead.

Nothing? Guess you should have checked out the Culture Jamming: Scams & Frauds page instead.

Political dirty tricks have been an amusing part of campaign season for a long time now. The Culture Jammer's Encyclopedia has a number of examples, particularly in their Guerrilla Hacks and News Trolls sections.

Among these:

The punk rock group Crass spliced together bits of speeches by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, along with background noises, to make a tape that sounded like a phone conversation between the two of them that had been recorded from a crossed line. The U.S. State Department denounced the recording as the product of the KGB.

The legendary Dick Tuck played a number of tricks on the other Tricky Dick during his campaigns.

You should definitely check out this parody billboard altered as a commentary on the latest Bush candidacy.

The group ®TMark has made parody web sites of Rudy Giuliani's and George Bush's campaigns, amongst their many other hacks.

But also, citizens have been able to use sneaky and theatrical tactics against their oppressive governments. Some of the street theater being practiced now against Fujimori in Peru is similar in flavor to that of the recently successful Otpor group in Serbia, which in turn owes a debt

Other good sites on campaign hacks include: How to Make Trouble and Influence People and Dirty Deeds and How To Deal With Them.

Political dirty tricks have been an amusing part of campaign season for a long time now. The Culture Jammer's Encyclopedia has a number of examples, particularly in their Guerrilla Hacks and News Trolls sections.

Among these:

The punk rock group Crass spliced together bits of speeches by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, along with background noises, to make a tape that sounded like a phone conversation between the two of them that had been recorded from a crossed line. The U.S. State Department denounced the recording as the product of the KGB.

The legendary Dick Tuck played a number of tricks on the other Tricky Dick during his campaigns.

You should definitely check out this parody billboard altered as a commentary on the latest Bush candidacy.

The group ®TMark has made parody web sites of Rudy Giuliani's and George Bush's campaigns, amongst their many other hacks.

But also, citizens have been able to use sneaky and theatrical tactics against their oppressive governments. Some of the street theater being practiced now against Fujimori in Peru is similar in flavor to that of the recently successful Otpor group in Serbia, which in turn owes a debt

Other good sites on campaign hacks include: How to Make Trouble and Influence People and Dirty Deeds and How To Deal With Them.

Political dirty tricks have been an amusing part of campaign season for a long time now. The Culture Jammer's Encyclopedia has a number of examples, particularly in their Guerrilla Hacks and News Trolls sections.

Among these:

The punk rock group Crass spliced together bits of speeches by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, along with background noises, to make a tape that sounded like a phone conversation between the two of them that had been recorded from a crossed line. The U.S. State Department denounced the recording as the product of the KGB.

The legendary Dick Tuck played a number of tricks on the other Tricky Dick during his campaigns.

You should definitely check out this parody billboard altered as a commentary on the latest Bush candidacy.

The group ®TMark has made parody web sites of Rudy Giuliani's and George Bush's campaigns, amongst their many other hacks.

But also, citizens have been able to use sneaky and theatrical tactics against their oppressive governments. Some of the street theater being practiced now against Fujimori in Peru is similar in flavor to that of the recently successful Otpor group in Serbia, which in turn owes a debt

Other good sites on campaign hacks include: How to Make Trouble and Influence People and Dirty Deeds and How To Deal With Them.

Political dirty tricks have been an amusing part of campaign season for a long time now. The Culture Jammer's Encyclopedia has a number of examples, particularly in their Guerrilla Hacks and News Trolls sections.

Among these:

The punk rock group Crass spliced together bits of speeches by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, along with background noises, to make a tape that sounded like a phone conversation between the two of them that had been recorded from a crossed line. The U.S. State Department denounced the recording as the product of the KGB.

The legendary Dick Tuck played a number of tricks on the other Tricky Dick during his campaigns.

You should definitely check out this parody billboard altered as a commentary on the latest Bush candidacy.

The group ®TMark has made parody web sites of Rudy Giuliani's and George Bush's campaigns, amongst their many other hacks.

But also, citizens have been able to use sneaky and theatrical tactics against their oppressive governments. Some of the street theater being practiced now against Fujimori in Peru is similar in flavor to that of the recently successful Otpor group in Serbia, which in turn owes a debt

Other good sites on campaign hacks include: How to Make Trouble and Influence People and Dirty Deeds and How To Deal With Them.

Check it out at http://www.syntac.net/dl/Clam/reson.html.

Some good examples of this sort of hacking can be found at the Idiosyntactix Culture Jammer's Encyclopedia - especially in their Guerrilla Hacks and Modest Proposals sections.

Some good examples of this sort of hacking can be found at the Idiosyntactix Culture Jammer's Encyclopedia - especially in their Guerrilla Hacks and Modest Proposals sections.

Some good examples of this sort of hacking can be found at the Idiosyntactix Culture Jammer's Encyclopedia - especially in their Guerrilla Hacks and Modest Proposals sections.

Great Post! Indeed this is a valuable story, but I question whether it is truly "Stuff that matters"

if college pranks get you off, go here. It covers college pranks across the country including MIT and CalTech.

Hoaxing the news is a fun hobby, but in a way it's like shooting fish in a barrel. Complicated and proud doctrines of journalistic ethics don't save reporters from breaking the one important rule of journalism: Don't talk big shit about stuff you don't know anything about.

I have a rule I've developed for evaluating newspaper stories, and it almost never fails:

The more I know about a subject from actual experience and personal expertise, the less accurate the news coverage of that subject seems. But the more my knowledge of a subject is based on prejudice and guesswork, the more news coverage of that subject seems to agree with my preconceptions.

Reporters can't be experts on everything, and they can't even be very good reporters from the looks of things. So a reporter who wants to succeed quickly has to learn how to spackle over the available facts with a plausable narrative that flows smoothly with folk psychology and consensus reality.

What comes out the end of this process is competent, professional crap. It doesn't allow us a window on the world, but only a nonconfrontational mirror of our own preconceptions.

You can get as much value from swapping urban legends.

More importantly: what, if anything, can we do to bring about the end of this media merger maddness before MS/AOL/GE/Disney happens?

I want to cancel my Time/Warner cable subscription, but I get my cable internet access through them, and there's no other high-speed alternative here. I would love to not use microsoft products, but 100% of my clients do.

I'm trying to be optimistic about the potential of the internet to democratize communication...but I wonder if we (actual people) have already lost. The truth now is that dramatic action is needed to bring a stop to this. I started re-reading Media Monopoly (by Ben Bagdikian) the day the AOL/Time Warner merger was announced. The most recent edition was released in 1997, when the puny merger of Disney and ABC/Cap Cities ($19 billion) was still the largest media merger in history. At that time, 10 corporations controled over 50% of the media.

That's media's weak point. Media exists to be consumed - otherwise, it fails, both in purpose and financially.

Children have no immunity. They are hard-wired to absorb everything that surrounds them, and it helps form the neural passageways that make them who they are. This is where parents can have an effect, by directing the children's senses to correct things. Even a little proding will result in positive effects, and the children will seek out more for themselves.

As they become older, they become better consumers, realizing a little how the media sources are not always benevolent. I remember as early as grade school being taught the basics of advertising, and how effective techniques (bandwagon, celebrity endorsement, etc.) are not always logically consistant. Kids should probably get a media class early in life, the earlier the better.

Soon, the tricks become transparent. They recognize simple trends (Gap trying to make products look cool, Coke associating their product with a catchy tune), and they become less effective. Media that once worked becomes less effective (remember the Hanna-Barbara shorts that were always the same? Hawkman confronts enemy, gets caught, bird saves, Hawkman is victorious. Or how about the fill-in-the-blank Scooby Doo plots?). Even when the media recognizes the consumer is getting smarter, they still have a hard time (Sprite still tries celebrity endorsement, but refers to the fact that they are doing it, and it hasn't worked on me yet).

Eventually, we become the Regulons. We walk out of the room during commercials. We play drinking games around product placement. We buy the same product for less at the off-brand store. We create content, instead of consuming it. We create products like the TiVo to eliminate comercials, or SlashDot, which bars the most annoying of ads.

They try harder and harder (creating Java game commercials, million-dollar superbowl spots, advertisements on bannanas, chalk drawings), but we get smarter and smarter. They will survive, since there is always the unaware to fall into the trap, but there are some predators out there, and some of them have a moral obligation to educate others.

Why not join us?

The Pseudoscience page has some great examples of scientific-sounding nonsense. And sure enough, the historical examples show that the outwardly sophisticated are often the most thoroughly taken marks.

Perhaps its our curiosity toward (and faith in) scientific-sounding things that makes us especially vulnerable to magic laundry magnets, cargo cult engineered diagnostic machinery, and the like.

The Pseudoscience page has some great examples of scientific-sounding nonsense. And sure enough, the historical examples show that the outwardly sophisticated are often the most thoroughly taken marks.

Perhaps its our curiosity toward (and faith in) scientific-sounding things that makes us especially vulnerable to magic laundry magnets, cargo cult engineered diagnostic machinery, and the like.

The Pseudoscience page has some great examples of scientific-sounding nonsense. And sure enough, the historical examples show that the outwardly sophisticated are often the most thoroughly taken marks.

Perhaps its our curiosity toward (and faith in) scientific-sounding things that makes us especially vulnerable to magic laundry magnets, cargo cult engineered diagnostic machinery, and the like.

Didn't take long for the Starr Warriors to discover a way to use these DNA wires to track people's sex lives:

Sexprinting: Using Electrical Gene Resonance to Track Sexual Activity