I have read the other messages but for the life of me I can't figure out how you were able to achieve high grades in school unless your mind was extremely adept at making imaginary pictures while you were reading textbooks. It took a number of years before I realized that my mental picture making process functioned mostly at an unconscious level of awareness. It's something like having a photo album full of pictures, but not being allowed to look at them - instead, there's a servant gnome that examines the relevant picture and reports 'digitally' (with words & such) about what is in the picture.
I never read much of my textbooks. It was too difficult to keep track of everything, so I got enough of the lesson from lectures and spot-reading to feign an understanding of the material.
As for federal (sic) schools -- what do you suggest instead? What I said ('Feral Government's schools') was stated as it was intentionally. While schools are supposedly run at a state/local level, the 'feral' Federal Government has a giant Department of Education that does a lot of meddling.
Anyways, John Holt and John Gatto, both award-winning schoolteachers, eventually gave up on trying to fix government schools. One of Holt's last books was Teach Your Own. Gatto had some good suggestions for current teachers in A Different Kind of Teacher, and in his other books too. Search for "seven lesson schoolteacher" for a succinct analysis of how the system fails.
The main problem with factory 'education' is that it's something done 'to' a child. It would be much more effective and efficient if the child was enlisted as an agent in their own learning experiences - primarily by letting the learner decide what and when they want to learn a given lesson.
I'm aware of how people have different primary representational modalities - most people fall under 'see', 'feel' and 'hear'.
I'm mostly a visual myself ("Oh, I see what you're saying"), but due to a combination of factors of which I'm barely aware (fell & broke a rib when I was little, etc), my primary modality is at a mostly-unconcious level of perception. I found a reference to this as a "digital" representational system - I just sort of know that my car is white... I've said before it's like having a gnome look at the picture on my behalf, and report back (in words) what the answer to the question is. If that makes any sense.
My problem with reading is that I have trouble keeping track of things. It's one thing to know my car is white, or to "read" a book where I've already seen a cinematic version (Star Wars/Star Trek - I know what a Star Destroyer looks like because I saw one once). But when the author is 'painting' the scene with his words, I can't make the leap.
At least I figured out that I was missing out on something. If one is unaware of a problem, they don't know to fix it either.:)
I don't have any visual imagination. One of my classic NLP books (Frogs Into Princes?) has a procedure for increasing one's access to their non-preferred representational system. You start by getting in touch with your favorite system, then gradually increasing the other modalities. If one is primarily kinesthetic (that is, they like to 'feel' things out), you have the subject really get in touch with the kinesthetics of an imaginary scene (field of grass, for example). Then you build in the other representational systems - the sound of wind blowing through the grass & other sounds, the light reflecting through a droplet of water, etc. Something like that.
Win Wenger has some good techniques for getting pictures too. I tried most of them years ago, but my blockage with the internally-generated pictures/feelings/sounds stems from a nervous system imbalance. Don't know how that causes it, just that it's the problem. Long story, won't get into it tonight.
Kids learn to read anywhere between the ages of 2 and 9. My mother taught herself to read when she was 5 years old - her parents had decided that a caretaker was cheaper than kindergarten, and mom was extremely bored. Motivation is what counts, mostly. By trying to force all kids to read at age 5, the system hurts children who won't want to learn to read until later.
I do okay with non-fiction, but my "imagination" functionality is totally disabled. Almost got it figured out...
Read the comment & follow-ups linked above for more on how I figured out that I can't really read.
Good thing these fine young scholars are boldly venturing forth into the areas of meteorology most crucially important to the Midwestern region of the United States. Oceans drive climate systems across the entire planet. Surely you've heard of El Nino and La Nina? One is a 'warm ocean', and the other is a 'cool ocean'.
Furthermore, the positions of warm and cool spots in the ocean control where the jet streams flow, and the jet streams determine who gets rain and who gets drought. I understand that the warm anomalies are probably caused by underwater volcanic activity, but this is one aspect of the earth's geology that we have precious little data about - those underwater volcanoes are notoriously difficult to study...
Wisconsin has lots of farming which is dependent on rainfall, so it's entirely appropriate that they're trying to improve their forecasting models.
I guess I'm wondering- are modern medical advances really as expensive as we're led to believe they are in America?
The real advances in modern medicine are the cheap ones that actually treat the root causes of a problem. Nutrition, Osteopathic Manipulation, IV therapies (w/ vitamins, EDTA, H202, and others), Energy Medicine, etc.
Most the other 'advances' can best be explained as 'profiteering' - clinics have to pay for for their $million+ MRI machine somehow, and the handful of cases a month where they're actually justified isn't going to pay the bills..
Re:3 million dollars per year is a pittance
on
Is SETI Worth It?
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· Score: 1
There are lots of longshots in the SETI program. The main one being the assumption that intelligent species use radio to communicate. I doubt that an advanced ET society is going to limit their communications to the speed of light.
The SETI project is certain members of humanity looking for a civilization just like what has emerged in the last 100-or-so years on this particular planet. Give it another 10 years, and we're likely to make a breakthrough that makes radio obsolete (something based on quantum entanglement, perhaps).
This being the case, SETI is like looking for a needle in a haystack: you might find the needle you're looking for, but you're certain to waste a lot of time.
Besides, what alien civilization would want to interact with us? Things are still quite barbaric on this particular rock...
I made note of a quote some time back, and found the slip of paper just yesterday. I think it's applicable to the present story:
Great Powers in relative decline instinctively respond by spending more on "security", and thereby divert potential resources from "investment" and compound their long-term dilema.
This move by the Empire to deny its subjects the opportunity to discover chemistry is another shot in the foot. Concerned parents will just have to get a little more creative in sourcing educational experiences for their children...
I think that Feral is quite descriptive of what the United States 'Federal' Government has become:
1: of, relating to, or suggestive of a wild beast 2 b: having escaped from domestication and become wild
(emphasis added)
The use of similar-but-different adjectives and nouns allows me to convey other messages without saying them outright. "The Federal Government is out of control", "Neoconservatives are a bunch of criminals" and "Dick Cheney is an unredeemed monster" were the embedded messages in that post. You picked up on at least one, so I guess you win a prize. Here's a couple extra bits thrown your way:
But with that transition we would be sacrificing our superpower status and the Federal level players will never willingly let that happen. America has already given up its status as a superpower. The war in Iraq has drained America dry - most just haven't really realized it yet.
The main problem is that empires are backed by industrial power. Waging war requires a lot of goods. While the United States economy still produces a lot of military equipment (bullets & bombs, cruise missiles, airplanes & helicopters, etc), production of other goods required to support the economy has shifted over the past 30+ years to other countries: Japan, Mexico, Taiwan, China, etc. The trade deficit has risen concurrently with the shift to offshore production. Trade is fine, as long as it's a two-way street. As it is, the U.S. has been freeloading for a generation, and the piper always gets his due.
This was fine as long as Japan/et al could use their surplus dollars to buy Crude Oil. But now more and more oil-producing countries are accepting (and preferring) Euros/Yen/etc for their product, and are divesting themselves of their dollar holdings. See Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hitman on how the Feral Government enlisted the Saudi royal family's help in establishing the Petro-Dollar, to help finance their push for Empire. (Saudis bought U.S. Treasuries with all the excess dollars they had).
There was a recession from March-November of 2001. It was caused by Bill Clinton's dismantling of the economy via NAFTA, and the dot-com bubble. Instead of having an orderly restructuring of the economy, GWB, Alan Greenspan and the U.S. Congress worked together to blow an even bigger bubble in the nation's housing markets.
Anyways, the housing market has now 'popped', and it's all downhill for the Empire from here on out. This is a good thing, as the Feral Government's Perpetual War sucks money from the middle class and redistributes it to Wall Street and the Military-Industrial Complex.
Not to imply that the Neoconvicts aren't still a loose cannon. I guess Darth Cheney is gaga over nuking Iran - see Esquire's recent piece, The Secret History of the Impending War with Iran That the White House Doesn't Want You to Know. If Cheney/et al are successful in turning their 'wet dream' into reality, it'll just be that much more Karma that We The People will have to meet, and the depression will be that much worse ('cause China/Russia are fully capable of bitchslapping our now-hollow economy).
Save America: Help Ron Paul, he's our only hope. As the economy tanks over the course of the coming year, Ron Paul's support will continue to grow, while the rest of the Republicrat candidates will have to buy their support one vote at a time.
thought I was done with this post. Oops.:)
IIRC, Swann wrote it because it was a subject which had been neglected, and is easily the most mass-market of all IIRC, Swann wrote [Great Apparitions of Mary] because it was a subject which [he felt had] been neglected, and [it] is easily the most mass-market of all [Swann's books. I seem to recall the ebay seller I bought it from was marketing it to the Catholic crowd.]
Swann wrote a book titled The Great Apparitions of Mary - I don't have a copy handy, but as I recall, the 22 cases covered were those that had the best documentation. The first was the Lady of Guadelupe, in the 1531. Swann makes a link between the apparition and the Spaniards' success at conquering the continent (human sacrifice was common in the Inca Empire). I do recall something about Communism being mentioned, but that was not the main point of the book. IIRC, Swann wrote it because it was a subject which had been neglected, and is easily the most mass-market of all
I was writing a bit of a Swann-fanboy post, but I'm not. I'll simply state that my impression of the man (obtained through his books, an Art Bell radio interview, and two presentations at the International Remote Viewing Association conference [Vegas is a four hour drive; I went twice to hear Mr. Swann speak])is that he has an impeccable attention to detail. He's a historian, and ties his research into the books he's written.
Even though I don't finish most of my books, I have a way of opening them to a page with a relevant quote. This one seemed to be for you today:
Ingo probes into many of the causes of officialdom's mindfuck: it boils down to who's to have power. Since about 1769 the industrial civilizations of the Western world have, by regulating human creative energies, attempted to change, by-pass, kill or obliterate the obvious in the name of Progress; in the name of Empire; in the name of vested interests both religious and secular; in the name of science as only materialism; in the name of formalism and uniformitarianism.
-from Paula Gunn Allen's introduction to Psychic Sexuality
But then my own belief system is abnormal by all counts, one aspect of which is that the whole religion scam is designed deliberately to keep people from believing in and using their own innate power. Are you familiar with Ingo Swann's work? He has a couple books out on the subject of Power - Secrets of Power Vol. I, Vol. II, Reality Boxes, Wisdom Category. Very high-level books - I have them, but can't read them yet. But then again, I couldn't read Harry Potter either.:)
Well, let's begin with the most boring and basic details. We're hosted at a Savvis data center in the Bay Area. Do you ever worry that a big earthquake will hit and your datacenter goes offline? Do you at least keep an offsite backup?
Not familiar with that one, so I had to look it up:
Hanlon's Razor (or Hanlon's Law) is a corollary of Finagle's law. Hanlon's Razor says "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
That's a pretty easy way to deal with the inconvenient truth of the matter: thumbs in your ears, "la la la la, I can't hear you", never even considering the evidence. The rich get richer, the middle class disappears and defends the massive wealth transfer anyways.
Gatto has made an incredible contribution to understanding the reason schools function the way they do. Also recommended is the life work of John Holt.
Electronic health records [EHR], such as this new system offered by Microsoft, is the latest placebo promoted as a fix for the American system of health care.
From the fine article:
"It's going to be a long journey," Mr. Neupert said. "To make a difference in health care, it is doing to take time and scale. And Microsoft has both." The advantages of the EHR is that all the doctors a patient sees have instant access to all the patient's medical history. This includes the results of diagnostic tests (X-Rays, MRIs, CT-Scans, Endoscopy, Colonoscopy, allergies, etc). The theory is that we'd get better results from the healthcare system if only practitioners had better information. While better information might help a little bit, and also would probably help reduce the amount of duplicate tests ordered, better sharing of this kind of information will make little difference in patients' outcomes.
There are various philosophies of healing, and to make a difference, a more effective philosophy than 'allopahty' has to be adopted. Allopathy - a derogatory term coined by a homeopath for his competitors who used drugs to counteract an illness' symptoms - has become the definition of the practice of Medicine in the United States. From the Arizona Revised Statutes:
19. "Medicine" means allopathic medicine as practiced by the recipient of a degree of doctor of medicine.
Don't get me wrong - modern medicine has done extremely well with getting to the core of many medical problems. Emergency medicine is also a fine art, with which I have no qualms.
But allopathic medicine is mostly powerless to deal with most chronic degenerative disease. Sure, the allopath will prescribe something to help with the symptoms, and sometimes surgery is the best that one can do under the circumstances (severe knee degeneration, for example). But it's better to treat the cause of the problem before the patient is on their deathbed.
But treating the nearly-dead patient is much more profitable for the system (hospital chains, equipment manufactures, pharmaceutical companies, G.E., etc) than lifestyle changes early-on in one's lifetime. For example, in The Great Modern Glucose Poisoning Epidemic, it's much more profitable for the system to wait for a pre-diabetic to develop full-blown type 2 diabetes before begining treatment...
I'll just refer to two of my previous posts (here and at kuro5hin.org) for supporting links/commentary:
When I read the title, I immediately thought of Mirror Neurons, which enable primates to imitate and empathize with other members of their species. It'd be cool if the researchers were building a silicon mirror-neuron system, but alas, such is not the case.
The same countrywide that had a sorta-run on the bank in August?
Anxious customers jammed the phone lines and website of Countrywide Bank and crowded its branch offices to pull out their savings because of concerns about the financial problems of the mortgage lender that owns the bank.
Countrywide Financial Corp., the biggest home-loan company in the nation, sought Thursday to assure depositors and the financial industry that both it and its bank were fiscally stable. And federal regulators said they weren't alarmed by the volume of withdrawals from the bank.
At Countrywide Bank offices, in a scene rare since the U.S. savings-and-loan crisis ended in the early '90s, so many people showed up to take out some or all of their money that in some cases they had to leave their names.
Bill Ashmore drove his Porsche Cayenne to Countrywide's Laguna Niguel office and waited half an hour to cash out $500,000, which he then wired to an account at Bank of America.
"It's because of the fear of the bankruptcy," said Ashmore, president of Irvine's Impac Mortgage Holdings, which escaped bankruptcy itself recently by shutting down virtually all its lending and laying off hundreds of employees.
"It's got my wife totally freaked out," he said. "I just don't want to deal with it. I don't care about losing 90 days' interest, I don't care if it's FDIC-insured -- I just want it out."
In a statement, the bank said: "It is very important to remember that Countrywide Bank is well capitalized, with FDIC-insured deposits, and is one of the largest banks in the United States, with assets over $107 billion."
The bank added that it had significant access to outside capital and was still highly rated by debt-rating firms.
But in theory, a gold standard assigns an intrinsic value to money. Since gold is mined at around a 3% increase every year, inflation is under control. The reason Gold worked so well for so long is that, before the 20th century, Gold took a lot of manpower/man-hours to get out of the ground. An economic system based on gold gave people a unit to trade their labors in.
Suppose one man spends his time digging gold out of the Alaskan tundra/California Gold Country/etc. Others spend their time farming, making jewlery, making leather for saddles, making tools, making cloth, and so forth, fulfilling all of a society's various needs. Gold-backed currency allowed all these different trades to trade their time in a pretty equitable manner. 1/2 month of gold-mining == 1 saddle == a nice suit of clothes, or something like that.
The gold standard is no longer feasible because one Caterpillar earthmover (and a little chemistry) can do the labor of 1000 men in 1/10th the time. Many mines were taken offline in the 90's because extracting gold had become too easy, and the price of gold had fallen accordingly. The present rise in the price of gold is not so much a return to the historical norm, as reflective of the debasement of the dollar by the 'Feral' Reserve.
The Feral Reserve needs to be replaced with a bank that supports the monetary needs of the middle-class. A fiat currency is fine, as long as the rate of increase in the currency is strictly controlled, and is evenly distributed throughout the system (as, say, 1% interest on all checking deposits - no idea how exactly to do this, but someone could surely find a fair method for disbursement).
Presently the recipients of the newly printed 'dollars' benefit the most, because Haliburton gets to spend it's brand-new $1billion before anyone else realizes that yet another billion dollars has been injected into the economy. A good deal if your name is "Darth" Cheney and you own lots of Haliburton stock, but a giant screwing of everyone else.
1972-3 Nixon or someone went to the Saudis and "persuaded" them somehow to remain only US dollars in return for oil. No idea what they promised, but it was big.
Modernization of the country: all Saudis were too good to be garbage collectors, so goats eating garbage was common. Western companies got large contracts to 'westernize' the place. Garbage collectors were imported from Asia. Desalinization plants were built, etc.
Military support for the Saudi Royal Family: "We'll keep you in power, all you gotta do is accept our 'dollar' and only our 'dollar' for your oil"
A certain Saudi prince had a thing for blonds. So Mr. Perkins got him a blond escort.
etc.
Perkins covers the many reasons why common people in non-westernized nations tend to hate the U.S. Feral Government - the things 'our' government has done/supported aren't especially nice. From the link above:
"Economic hit men," John Perkins writes, "are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder."
John Perkins should know--he was an economic hit man. His job was to convince countries that are strategically important to the U.S.--from Indonesia to Panama--to accept enormous loans for infrastructure development, and to make sure that the lucrative projects were contracted to U. S. corporations. Saddled with huge debts, these countries came under the control of the United States government, World Bank and other U.S.-dominated aid agencies that acted like loan sharks--dictating repayment terms and bullying foreign governments into submission.
Now... 35 years later, there are trillions of US dollars out there sitting in central banks waiting to be spent on mostly oil. If oil were to be available in Euros, the dollars would be useless. They would come back to the USA.
The dollar will be worthless in the near future - 6 months? 12 Months? Hard to predict exactly when, but if the 'Neoconvicts' do eventually wage another illegal war of aggression against Iran, China and Russia will likely repudiate the dollar immediately thereafter. If I had much cash, I'd be buying Euros...
I recently borrowed the book from the library, after reading a chapter in the middle about how the Supreme Court declared in the post-war period that Corporations are people too. This singular peculiarity of the law has enabled the present-day concentration of wealth in the hands of a handful of Americans.
Whatever flaws Beatty's book has, it also has some good points. It meshes nicely with Gatto's Underground History of American Education. Gatto maintains that the government schools started to take off in the late 19th/early 20th centuries for the purpose of providing a dumbed-down workforce for the industrialists' factories.
These are all questions that the US people need to ask in order to ensure that if they are no longer able to enforce their will overseas militarily no other nation tries looking for revenge against a weakened opponent. It's not like The Populace itself chose the path of empire. Joe & Jane American have always been trying to 'just get along'. No, the problem is that a bunch of criminals ('Neoconvicts') carjacked the Republic and have been going on a joy ride for the last 140+ years.
The Neoconvict's goal has always been to concentrate wealth & power in the hands of the few.
Most of us are just along for the ride, and only recently has awareness of how we're being used reached mass consciousness. But even now, some people prefer to cling to the illusion...
but I am not hopeful this will happen in my lifetime. The second great depression will bring the changes you're waiting for. Awareness of said depression is spreading rapidly now.
I'm actually quite optimistic about how things are progressing. If the depression happens quickly enough, Darth Cheney won't get to destroy Iran, and We the People can go about rebuilding our noble Republic.
I think fusion's been a failure because a lot of the current economic status quo would be irrelevant if the technology made it into the wild. Imagine that, instead of paying your pound of sweat to the electricity & oil companies every month, you ran your Mr. Fusion on tap water. You make a one time investment in the machine, and a trivial amount every month to supply your machine with H20. Pennies a month for all the clean electricity you could possibly use.
I say this having met a rather brilliant grad student who was working on 'cold fusion'. At the time (2002) he said that he'd have to revise one of his papers because of recently published Tokamak (hot fusion) research. It had come out just like he thought it would, but he had to mention it anyways...
Suppression wouldn't be so difficult - just indoctrinate students in the pre-ordained "Laws of Physics" (or "Laws of Thermodynamics"). This way, whenever the result doesn't come out like the Laws say they should, they'll figure the anomaly comes from their experimental setup. They'll never even suspect that their slight deviation from the expected result means that the Law itself needs to be revised.
My cousin is now doing fine, thanks to Grandma's intervention. He's a senior partner in a structural engineering firm, and has more money than he knows what to do with.
Not being able to tell the difference between 'pecans' and 'walnuts' is exactly the kind of fuckup you'd expect when children are taught to read with whole-word methodology. Written English is phonetic, and this is how it should be taught (excepting special circumstances - I can't think of any off the top of my head, but I'm sure it's possible).
Slashdot Mirror
I never read much of my textbooks. It was too difficult to keep track of everything, so I got enough of the lesson from lectures and spot-reading to feign an understanding of the material. As for federal (sic) schools -- what do you suggest instead? What I said ('Feral Government's schools') was stated as it was intentionally. While schools are supposedly run at a state/local level, the 'feral' Federal Government has a giant Department of Education that does a lot of meddling.
Anyways, John Holt and John Gatto, both award-winning schoolteachers, eventually gave up on trying to fix government schools. One of Holt's last books was Teach Your Own. Gatto had some good suggestions for current teachers in A Different Kind of Teacher, and in his other books too. Search for "seven lesson schoolteacher" for a succinct analysis of how the system fails.
The main problem with factory 'education' is that it's something done 'to' a child. It would be much more effective and efficient if the child was enlisted as an agent in their own learning experiences - primarily by letting the learner decide what and when they want to learn a given lesson.
Thanks for responding.
I'm mostly a visual myself ("Oh, I see what you're saying"), but due to a combination of factors of which I'm barely aware (fell & broke a rib when I was little, etc), my primary modality is at a mostly-unconcious level of perception. I found a reference to this as a "digital" representational system - I just sort of know that my car is white... I've said before it's like having a gnome look at the picture on my behalf, and report back (in words) what the answer to the question is. If that makes any sense.
My problem with reading is that I have trouble keeping track of things. It's one thing to know my car is white, or to "read" a book where I've already seen a cinematic version (Star Wars/Star Trek - I know what a Star Destroyer looks like because I saw one once). But when the author is 'painting' the scene with his words, I can't make the leap.
At least I figured out that I was missing out on something. If one is unaware of a problem, they don't know to fix it either.
Win Wenger has some good techniques for getting pictures too. I tried most of them years ago, but my blockage with the internally-generated pictures/feelings/sounds stems from a nervous system imbalance. Don't know how that causes it, just that it's the problem. Long story, won't get into it tonight.
Thanks for responding.
I'm 26 and never really learned to read myself.
Kids learn to read anywhere between the ages of 2 and 9. My mother taught herself to read when she was 5 years old - her parents had decided that a caretaker was cheaper than kindergarten, and mom was extremely bored. Motivation is what counts, mostly. By trying to force all kids to read at age 5, the system hurts children who won't want to learn to read until later.
I do okay with non-fiction, but my "imagination" functionality is totally disabled. Almost got it figured out...
Read the comment & follow-ups linked above for more on how I figured out that I can't really read.
Furthermore, the positions of warm and cool spots in the ocean control where the jet streams flow, and the jet streams determine who gets rain and who gets drought. I understand that the warm anomalies are probably caused by underwater volcanic activity, but this is one aspect of the earth's geology that we have precious little data about - those underwater volcanoes are notoriously difficult to study...
Wisconsin has lots of farming which is dependent on rainfall, so it's entirely appropriate that they're trying to improve their forecasting models.
I guess I'm wondering- are modern medical advances really as expensive as we're led to believe they are in America?
The real advances in modern medicine are the cheap ones that actually treat the root causes of a problem. Nutrition, Osteopathic Manipulation, IV therapies (w/ vitamins, EDTA, H202, and others), Energy Medicine, etc.
Most the other 'advances' can best be explained as 'profiteering' - clinics have to pay for for their $million+ MRI machine somehow, and the handful of cases a month where they're actually justified isn't going to pay the bills..
See links on how healthcare became screwed up, read Dr. Davidson's testimonial pages for examples of conditions which respond well to Cranial Osteopathy, check out Donna Eden's system of Energy Medicine, and get yourself a copy of Dr. Reilly's Handbook for Health Through Drugless Therapy, and I'm sure you can easily get your intestine flowing freely again.
There are lots of longshots in the SETI program. The main one being the assumption that intelligent species use radio to communicate. I doubt that an advanced ET society is going to limit their communications to the speed of light.
The SETI project is certain members of humanity looking for a civilization just like what has emerged in the last 100-or-so years on this particular planet. Give it another 10 years, and we're likely to make a breakthrough that makes radio obsolete (something based on quantum entanglement, perhaps).
This being the case, SETI is like looking for a needle in a haystack: you might find the needle you're looking for, but you're certain to waste a lot of time.
Besides, what alien civilization would want to interact with us? Things are still quite barbaric on this particular rock...
This move by the Empire to deny its subjects the opportunity to discover chemistry is another shot in the foot. Concerned parents will just have to get a little more creative in sourcing educational experiences for their children...
The use of similar-but-different adjectives and nouns allows me to convey other messages without saying them outright. "The Federal Government is out of control", "Neoconservatives are a bunch of criminals" and "Dick Cheney is an unredeemed monster" were the embedded messages in that post. You picked up on at least one, so I guess you win a prize. Here's a couple extra bits thrown your way:
0b10100111001
Have A Nice Day.
The main problem is that empires are backed by industrial power. Waging war requires a lot of goods. While the United States economy still produces a lot of military equipment (bullets & bombs, cruise missiles, airplanes & helicopters, etc), production of other goods required to support the economy has shifted over the past 30+ years to other countries: Japan, Mexico, Taiwan, China, etc. The trade deficit has risen concurrently with the shift to offshore production. Trade is fine, as long as it's a two-way street. As it is, the U.S. has been freeloading for a generation, and the piper always gets his due.
This was fine as long as Japan/et al could use their surplus dollars to buy Crude Oil. But now more and more oil-producing countries are accepting (and preferring) Euros/Yen/etc for their product, and are divesting themselves of their dollar holdings. See Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hitman on how the Feral Government enlisted the Saudi royal family's help in establishing the Petro-Dollar, to help finance their push for Empire. (Saudis bought U.S. Treasuries with all the excess dollars they had).
There was a recession from March-November of 2001. It was caused by Bill Clinton's dismantling of the economy via NAFTA, and the dot-com bubble. Instead of having an orderly restructuring of the economy, GWB, Alan Greenspan and the U.S. Congress worked together to blow an even bigger bubble in the nation's housing markets.
Anyways, the housing market has now 'popped', and it's all downhill for the Empire from here on out. This is a good thing, as the Feral Government's Perpetual War sucks money from the middle class and redistributes it to Wall Street and the Military-Industrial Complex.
Not to imply that the Neoconvicts aren't still a loose cannon. I guess Darth Cheney is gaga over nuking Iran - see Esquire's recent piece, The Secret History of the Impending War with Iran That the White House Doesn't Want You to Know. If Cheney/et al are successful in turning their 'wet dream' into reality, it'll just be that much more Karma that We The People will have to meet, and the depression will be that much worse ('cause China/Russia are fully capable of bitchslapping our now-hollow economy).
Save America: Help Ron Paul, he's our only hope. As the economy tanks over the course of the coming year, Ron Paul's support will continue to grow, while the rest of the Republicrat candidates will have to buy their support one vote at a time.
Much better.
I was writing a bit of a Swann-fanboy post, but I'm not. I'll simply state that my impression of the man (obtained through his books, an Art Bell radio interview, and two presentations at the International Remote Viewing Association conference [Vegas is a four hour drive; I went twice to hear Mr. Swann speak])is that he has an impeccable attention to detail. He's a historian, and ties his research into the books he's written.
Even though I don't finish most of my books, I have a way of opening them to a page with a relevant quote. This one seemed to be for you today:
have a nice day.
well, you know what they say: "you can't cure stupid".
Have a nice day.
Not familiar with that one, so I had to look it up:
:)
Hanlon's Razor (or Hanlon's Law) is a corollary of Finagle's law. Hanlon's Razor says "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
That's a pretty easy way to deal with the inconvenient truth of the matter: thumbs in your ears, "la la la la, I can't hear you", never even considering the evidence. The rich get richer, the middle class disappears and defends the massive wealth transfer anyways.
Gatto has made an incredible contribution to understanding the reason schools function the way they do. Also recommended is the life work of John Holt.
You've passed Mind-Fsck 101, apparently.
From the fine article: "It's going to be a long journey," Mr. Neupert said. "To make a difference in health care, it is doing to take time and scale. And Microsoft has both." The advantages of the EHR is that all the doctors a patient sees have instant access to all the patient's medical history. This includes the results of diagnostic tests (X-Rays, MRIs, CT-Scans, Endoscopy, Colonoscopy, allergies, etc). The theory is that we'd get better results from the healthcare system if only practitioners had better information. While better information might help a little bit, and also would probably help reduce the amount of duplicate tests ordered, better sharing of this kind of information will make little difference in patients' outcomes.
There are various philosophies of healing, and to make a difference, a more effective philosophy than 'allopahty' has to be adopted. Allopathy - a derogatory term coined by a homeopath for his competitors who used drugs to counteract an illness' symptoms - has become the definition of the practice of Medicine in the United States. From the Arizona Revised Statutes:
Don't get me wrong - modern medicine has done extremely well with getting to the core of many medical problems. Emergency medicine is also a fine art, with which I have no qualms.
But allopathic medicine is mostly powerless to deal with most chronic degenerative disease. Sure, the allopath will prescribe something to help with the symptoms, and sometimes surgery is the best that one can do under the circumstances (severe knee degeneration, for example). But it's better to treat the cause of the problem before the patient is on their deathbed.
But treating the nearly-dead patient is much more profitable for the system (hospital chains, equipment manufactures, pharmaceutical companies, G.E., etc) than lifestyle changes early-on in one's lifetime. For example, in The Great Modern Glucose Poisoning Epidemic, it's much more profitable for the system to wait for a pre-diabetic to develop full-blown type 2 diabetes before begining treatment...
I'll just refer to two of my previous posts (here and at kuro5hin.org) for supporting links/commentary:
the fundamental problem with insurance
links on how healthcare became screwed up
When I read the title, I immediately thought of Mirror Neurons, which enable primates to imitate and empathize with other members of their species. It'd be cool if the researchers were building a silicon mirror-neuron system, but alas, such is not the case.
Countrywide has had lots of coverage on both Mish's blog and at Housing Panic.
I hear Euros are the best bet to preserve one's wealth in the developing dollar collapse. Everbank.com is probably a good option.
Suppose one man spends his time digging gold out of the Alaskan tundra/California Gold Country/etc. Others spend their time farming, making jewlery, making leather for saddles, making tools, making cloth, and so forth, fulfilling all of a society's various needs. Gold-backed currency allowed all these different trades to trade their time in a pretty equitable manner. 1/2 month of gold-mining == 1 saddle == a nice suit of clothes, or something like that.
The gold standard is no longer feasible because one Caterpillar earthmover (and a little chemistry) can do the labor of 1000 men in 1/10th the time. Many mines were taken offline in the 90's because extracting gold had become too easy, and the price of gold had fallen accordingly. The present rise in the price of gold is not so much a return to the historical norm, as reflective of the debasement of the dollar by the 'Feral' Reserve.
The Feral Reserve needs to be replaced with a bank that supports the monetary needs of the middle-class. A fiat currency is fine, as long as the rate of increase in the currency is strictly controlled, and is evenly distributed throughout the system (as, say, 1% interest on all checking deposits - no idea how exactly to do this, but someone could surely find a fair method for disbursement).
Presently the recipients of the newly printed 'dollars' benefit the most, because Haliburton gets to spend it's brand-new $1billion before anyone else realizes that yet another billion dollars has been injected into the economy. A good deal if your name is "Darth" Cheney and you own lots of Haliburton stock, but a giant screwing of everyone else.
According to John Perkins' Confessions of An Economic Hitman, it was a variety of things:
Perkins covers the many reasons why common people in non-westernized nations tend to hate the U.S. Feral Government - the things 'our' government has done/supported aren't especially nice. From the link above:
Now... 35 years later, there are trillions of US dollars out there sitting in central banks waiting to be spent on mostly oil. If oil were to be available in Euros, the dollars would be useless. They would come back to the USA.
The dollar will be worthless in the near future - 6 months? 12 Months? Hard to predict exactly when, but if the 'Neoconvicts' do eventually wage another illegal war of aggression against Iran, China and Russia will likely repudiate the dollar immediately thereafter. If I had much cash, I'd be buying Euros...
I recently borrowed the book from the library, after reading a chapter in the middle about how the Supreme Court declared in the post-war period that Corporations are people too. This singular peculiarity of the law has enabled the present-day concentration of wealth in the hands of a handful of Americans.
Whatever flaws Beatty's book has, it also has some good points. It meshes nicely with Gatto's Underground History of American Education. Gatto maintains that the government schools started to take off in the late 19th/early 20th centuries for the purpose of providing a dumbed-down workforce for the industrialists' factories.
The Neoconvict's goal has always been to concentrate wealth & power in the hands of the few.
Most of us are just along for the ride, and only recently has awareness of how we're being used reached mass consciousness. But even now, some people prefer to cling to the illusion...
The New Money Pit: Housing Bust Gets Worse - a little something on how the housing bubble is infecting everything
American Economy: R.I.P.
I'm actually quite optimistic about how things are progressing. If the depression happens quickly enough, Darth Cheney won't get to destroy Iran, and We the People can go about rebuilding our noble Republic.
I think fusion's been a failure because a lot of the current economic status quo would be irrelevant if the technology made it into the wild. Imagine that, instead of paying your pound of sweat to the electricity & oil companies every month, you ran your Mr. Fusion on tap water. You make a one time investment in the machine, and a trivial amount every month to supply your machine with H20. Pennies a month for all the clean electricity you could possibly use.
I say this having met a rather brilliant grad student who was working on 'cold fusion'. At the time (2002) he said that he'd have to revise one of his papers because of recently published Tokamak (hot fusion) research. It had come out just like he thought it would, but he had to mention it anyways...
Suppression wouldn't be so difficult - just indoctrinate students in the pre-ordained "Laws of Physics" (or "Laws of Thermodynamics"). This way, whenever the result doesn't come out like the Laws say they should, they'll figure the anomaly comes from their experimental setup. They'll never even suspect that their slight deviation from the expected result means that the Law itself needs to be revised.
My cousin is now doing fine, thanks to Grandma's intervention. He's a senior partner in a structural engineering firm, and has more money than he knows what to do with.
Not being able to tell the difference between 'pecans' and 'walnuts' is exactly the kind of fuckup you'd expect when children are taught to read with whole-word methodology. Written English is phonetic, and this is how it should be taught (excepting special circumstances - I can't think of any off the top of my head, but I'm sure it's possible).