The race of giants in the story, as depicted by genetically altered enforcers, are possibly analogous to the Nephilim, the race of 14 ft tall aliens scheduled to arrive sometime in the next five-ten years once the so-called 'apocalypse' is underway. Hm. I didn't make that connection before.
Also, that whole sequence of religious fools you meet half-way through the game, all spinning in misery are an interesting foot note as well. . . Particularly if my memory serves correctly, regarding their association with the giants through some kind of virus. --The Nephilim, whenever they show up in human history, (I believe 8-9000 years ago was the last occurrence), are presented to us as gods, when really they are just a bunch of aliens similarly enslaved and co-opted by the next race up the food chain. Inter-breeding through genetic engineering apparently is also a feature of the whole cycle.
"Fallout" is a very interesting dream sequence indeed! The subconscious yelling up from the depths with warnings. . .
I find it interesting that Fallout is one of the recurring titles on this Slashdot gathering for all-time most replayed game.
It's not a particularly brilliant title. The game mechanics are a little weak in spots and there are a few bugs here and there. And yet. . . The game speaks to something in people in a very powerful way. . . Heck, I remember seeking it out, years after its initial release. I got it for about $15.00 packaged with Fallout2, and I don't even know how it entered my brain as a possible title to look for, but I remember waking up one day just knowing that I had to look for it and play the thing.
The first thing which struck me a couple of years afterwards was how the political picture of our current times was beginning to merge with the intro to Fallout. Cue it up and watch the intro movie on the disk again; "War. .." The war for dwindling resources ravaged the planet, leaving the world a Mad Max arrangement. The game even contained a subtle hint of alien involvement.
I sincerely hope that my fascination with the game doesn't mean I'm subconsciously preparing to survive the coming holocaust in that particular mode. --Worn black leather and a reliance on old shotgun shells doesn't strike me as a particularly fun way to exist.
Anyway. . .
Might as well add mine to the list of favorites from years past. . .
Rescue Raiders, for the Apple II. Helicopters on a Defender screen dropping cruise missiles.
Ultima III, for the Apple II. Not really for re-play so much as weeks of my life used up.
Conquest, for the Amiga, (a 16 kb game which was essentially MOO in 15 minutes with keyboard character graphics)
Dark Forces, for the PC. Before Phantom Menace or the cruddy re-releases, I got to be in Star Wars. Just my youth ringing in my ears. I must have played that last mission a hundred times through.
Solitaire, The hell with Microsoft, but that thing was more addictive than Tetris. I feel confident in saying that 95% of everybody here has played a few dozen hands of that time-waster.
Starcraft, Nothing like setting up your grunts in dugouts against the advancing Giger Alien hoards.
I don't own games anymore. Need to get work done. . .
Do you even know what the Hutton Inquiry was about? The BBC accused the government of lying over the Iraq War; The Hutton Inquiry said the BBC was wrong. Quite simple.
Yeah? This is just Good cop, Bad cop. Guess what? They're all cops.
The people who have been hired to fool you are working with 50 years and billions of dollars in collective research into human psychology. The CIA claimed, after WWII, to have 'owned' all the major news and media outlets, that the information people were getting was all colored and tempered by them. The U.K. bears little difference in how its secret services manage its populations.
If people don't believe that their media is squeaky clean, then they will stop listening to the media. It pays, then, to stage these little events so that people are satisfied with the purity of their news source of choice.
Here's a recent example of the BBC acting as little more than a government mouthpiece, (and not even the British government). . .
As for the rest of your post, what the fuck are you on about? That has nothing to do with the subject at hand.
If you want to know what 'the fuck' I was on about, try re-reading the post. Seems simple enough. If you can't see the relevance to the subject at hand, you might try reading with your eyes open.
You, so I could tattoo a lesson about punctuation onto your fat butt.
Hm. I generally only rag on people about poor spelling and grammar, etc., when I cannot understand what it is they are trying to say.
Sounds to me rather like you don't have anything intelligent to respond with to what I was putting forth. --But rather than admit this to me (or yourself), you prefer to sink to making unrelated attacks which border on the physically threatening. This behavior is sadly typical of the conservative mind-set. Conservatives are generally mentally or spiritually deficient in some very text-book manner.
But then, I'm making assumptions. Perhaps you just have trouble with adaptive reading comprehension.
He's conquered a whole 3% of the computer market. What a huge success. Not only that, but he's given away tens of thousands of dollars to charity, if you count Democratic politicians as charities.
He's a bigger loser than he was a decade ago.
Loser? When you're not in the game to 'win', losing only means not being able to continue playing.
One of my favorite personality types is the one which pisses off guys like you by not caring about winning or losing in the boring conventional terms so many people think hold validity. Creativity is everything. Greed is a disease. --This, I believe, is a Universal truth which shapes our reality, and once you figure it out, you can fly.
There's a reason why a fellow who has only 'conquered' 3% of the computer market is such a recognized name. It's because he's learned one of the key secrets of life; how to have fun while everybody else is agonizing over which way the ball is being kicked.
Who would you enjoy meeting more at a party? --A boring conservative money-getter, or a 'loser' who isn't scared to dream and get excited about it? All my friends are technically 'losers', but they live happily, without fear or want, and they light up the world. All the money-getters I've met, by contrast, are like pre-fab appliances with 2-dimensional social skills. These are the 'winners'. Hmm.
why are people so obsessed with rewarding single people with success of organizations?
Because most people in their lives simply manage to get to work on time, do as they are instructed, and pay their taxes. This behavior pattern does not inspire much of anything to the casual on-looker.
Having a "vision" isn't uncommon. Uncommon, however, is the person who is brave and strong and skilled enough to go about realizing it.
Many people strive to be so capable, and thus they look up to those who have managed it. Role models are what they are for this reason, or so I think.
"Do you want to sell sugar water or do you want to change the world?"
You don't come up with cool sayings like that unless you're right into it. (Or unless you have a great PR department, which I don't believe was the case).
My impression of Jobs is that he's simply entertaining his mania. --He sees possible futures where technology becomes an idealized, humanity-altering version of itself, and he's simply trying to realize this vision by following and then occupying what seem to him the obvious and inevitable steps.
Is he angling to go head-to-head with Microsoft? I doubt it. Guys like Jobs find reward and adrenalin rushes, etc., through realizing creative vision. Competition and the dark 'joy' of destroying competitors, and the 'joy' of collecting all the money in the world pale in comparison. Jobs is entirely capable of 'losing' to Gates, because winning and losing are of little importance when one's goal is merely to shape and advance. (Even if shaping and advancing mean being a control-freak, which is typical for people like Jobs. Nobody else can see it right or therefore do it right, so why muck about depending on others?)
Time for a little more metaphysical etymology. . .
"Gates" - Not quite the same as a door; doors can be opened and closed by regular individuals. A gate implies a door which is watched and controlled by somebody else, one which is designed to limit and control the flow of that which enters and exits. Bill exerts control over the flow of information.
"Jobs" - Tasks which need doing. Steve follows the work toward his peculiar vision, and then does it, no matter how ludicrous it may appear.
--His moves will at first seem irrational to the sharks, (and frustrated board members), because he likes to invest and play rather than invest and reap. But then when the circumstances are right and creativity blossoms, he suddenly seems like a genius.
My only trouble is that he's embraced the idea that people don't like to think outside certain boundaries and want to be coddled, which may well be true. This bothers me, because while he's out there changing the world, I have to live in it. --And I do not like to be coddled or to have somebody else do my thinking for me.
Candy-coated buttons piss me off. Complexity does not scare me.
That's how we grow. Even the activities which we love most involve pain while we learn how to do them.
So do you want your kid to grow up with a lot fewer life skills? Why not give him or her a video game-box to spend all those thousands of childhood growth hours on?
Heck, why not plug yourself into a game box as well? Why grow into a skilled and accomplished person with fine-tuned power over your emotional and spiritual being when you can be turning pixels on and off, over and over and over?
I know I'm being hypocritical here. . , I've wasted zillions of hours on video crack in my youth as well, and even learned a few useful skills and tactics doing so. --But I also built my own computer when I was a kid, went to creative lengths to pirate all my games, and most importantly, I didn't start until I was 12 years old. I'd wager that when today's kids are as old as my generation is now, they'll be generally much less socially aware and physically capable as a direct result of too much video crack when their young brains should be sucking up as much real-world experience as possible.
Bullshit. I guess you didn't hear about that whole Hutton Inquiry dealie. Or that whole "impartial by law" thing. Or the Ofcom codes which slap down partial broadcasters.
The idea of the BBC being propaganda is utterly ludicrous.
Utterly effective, actually. It certainly worked on you with near perfect results.
For goodness sake! The people who populate those boards of inquiry you mention are just as much mind-controlled to believe the lies as anybody else. Or they are controlled on a higher level wherein they deliberately work to create a false impression of justice in order to keep the people distracted from the truth of the matter; that Television exists for the primary purpose of population mind-control.
Have you ever asked yourself why the U.K. has a few hundred thousand surveillance cameras dotted throughout its cities? Or why the U.K. has one of the lowest standards of living for such an advanced industrialized nation? Or why the U.K. is one of the closest actualizations of Orwell's 1984 among the Western/European countries?
Controlling populations is the key. Keeping them locked down, miserable, ill-informed and yet willing to put up with it because they believe that TV is True, that the state of things is simply the way it is, and that nothing can be done to change it. Television lies. That's its job; to make you happy with your cage, to stop you from questioning. --And, of course, to make you knee-jerk with an automatic emotional response when somebody else does question the state of things.
Honestly. Only those who have been completely fooled would trust a television news program. Do you also believe that terrorists placed those bombs around London and that the British secret services didn't have a deliberate hand in perpetrating that debacle in order to keep the people frightened and fooled into supporting the government's enormously profitable war in the Middle East? --Profitable, that is, for military industrialist share-holders and their lapdogs in parliament. The public which pays for it all, however, gets to be taxed into oblivion.
So of COURSE they're going to own and use the media to make sure you stay mis-informed and proud of it. There's a LOT of money and power at stake.
[. ..] I've just reinstated them as the default search for my Firefox toolbar, because I think it should be supported for its brave decision.
I'm sorry, I RTFA, but I couldn't find a single argument in this BBC mouthpiece's screed which explains how doing as one is told by a dictator state is brave.
I don't care about Chinese policies, and I certainly wouldn't attempt to do something so stupid and selfish as to try to inflict my values on those of others.
But, dude, your government can shoot you in the head for refusing to do insane things. (Which is not so different from my government.)
Governments are corrupt, stupid things which take our money and abuse their power for personal benefit.
I don't support my government and I certainly don't think you should support yours.
But then I also don't think cowardice or believing in propaganda is cool. --And believing that we are not being exposed to propaganda all the time from our own governments is simply foolhardy.
Would somebody please name the other powerful military nation which was involved in recently pouring thousands of troops into the invasion of Iraq?
Thank you.
The BBC is also a psy-ops tool, so this article has a purpose and a design beyond telling the truth. --Because one of THE most important targets of a psyops war is your own population. It is essential to control the thinking of the masses if you want to keep those tax dollars flowing and your heads of state off the gallows.
"If the heads of state don't all hang together, they'll all hang separately."
--Yes Prime Minister
I don't know about UFO's but crop circles are 100% jokers with planks, laptops and GPS systems. Of course, when I was a kid they were just jokers with planks but then the circles they made were much simpler too.
Your data is incomplete. It is true that clever circles can be perpetrated by clever people, but there are simply too many anomalies to be accounted for. These include heat-burst nodules on the bend-points of the stalks, and those with perfect bends and no damange at all. --While the film does not get into examining why there are two different types, (those which interrupt the life process and those which do not), neither type can be accounted for by pranksters using basic physical force to bend stalks, techniques which cannot help but cause structural crushing and breaking damage to the plants.
Seeds from genuine circles will often display odd growth patterns when compared to control seeds from outside the circle.
There have been some instances where the plant-matter within a circle has been rendered magnetic. And other instances have seen enormously advanced circle formations appearing within twenty-minute windows between flights of air-bourn observers during the day.
There is a ton of strange evidence doucumented.
An excellent documentary film is available on the subject which is available at Block Buster, if you're interested. It's called, Crop Circles: Quest for Truth. It's well worth looking up. It has an interesting extra interview with one of the researchers who was threatened by the CIA to publicly denounce circles.
1. The BBC isn't exactly a reliable source of factual data at the best of times. The purpose of a big television station is to control public thinking, not enlighten it. So this poll is almost certainly a lie of some coloration.
2. Atheism versus Bible thumping. This fight is a pointless distraction. The Bible-Thumpers are wrong but are also too lost in the cultic experience to grasp this. (And too easily propelled by the few dollops of mysterious energy crud which pop up now and again, and which for some bizarre reason the thumpers instantly take as validation of the divine rather than as outright manipulation. . . But I digress). Basically, the vast majority of people are fools, but to spend one's day making a big stink over it and coming up with clever arguments to prove the fact isn't going to make it go away. Lots of people also have communicable diseases. Same deal. It's a fact of life. Steer clear of their company if you don't want to deal with the infection. But don't get all huffy over it; nobody is going to praise you for smashing a faith-based argument with another faith based argument. It's just pointless and boring, especially when. . .
3. Nearly everybody likes to leave out a huge swath of significant data when dealing with the question of where we came from. Crop Circles and UFO's aren't swamp gas and jokers with planks, as anybody knows who has properly examined the subjects. There's a much larger and much more interesting equation here which nearly everybody runs like mad from rather than examine. . .
Leaving out puzzle pieces because they happen to make one feel uncomfortable will only lead to an image riddled with holes.
Sorry, but logically the primary concern should be the mechanics of the very system through which copyright and patent privileges are able to exist.
If you can't fix the machine because it won't let you look under the hood, then the machine is doomed.
But that's pretty basic reasoning. Diebold is bleeding in the water, I think. . .
Too bad it's happening in a state where electoral fraud is less likely. I wonder if that was planned so as to throw off doubts about Diebold's process when the results are finally laid bare to public examination. . . This should be happening in one of the swing states. Alaska???
Alaskan water is frozen. . .
Big media is all owned by the CIA. It's been that way since the second world war. This story is a waste of time. We all know the election was fraudulent. We all know Bush is a criminal.
Everybody will all have their own definitions of these words, which is of course natural. To understand what I am talking about here, please allow me to ask that you put your definitions aside for a moment so that I can paint the following image which might be useful to some of you. . .
Both Secrecy and Privacy are tools which use the same gate. The gate restricts information both in and out, allowing for a controlled flow in both directions so that the individual or group only have to deal with or share chosen information.
Privacy is based on the fact that there is some information which individuals or groups can't deal with, which would upset them so much that they would unravel or become endangered through knowing. Such information needs to be processed gently, internally, or released a bit at a time. You can't digest a whole turkey in one gulp. An oxygen burning flame is blown out when fed too much air too quickly. To facilitate healthy growth, Privacy is needed to make sure the individual or group is not overwhelmed or destroyed. Privacy does not intend to hold forever; only until it is no longer too hurtful or dangerous to share or allow in.
There is another type of intent, however, which uses the same tools but which has nothing to do with facilitating healthy growth. It has to do with avoiding spiritual growth and it has to do with controlling others for personal gain by withholding information. This is the essence of Secrecy.
The difference lies entirely in the Intent of the person or people making the choices on how the information gate is used. --Privacy exists to facilitate healthy growth, while Secrecy is there to stop or reverse growth.
I find Google's move disappointing.
Right when I was beginning to warm up to them for denying Bush access to their data base, they had to pull this nonsense.
I've done RTFA, giving it more than twice as much attention as it deserves
Hm. I just skimmed it and I found it rather agreeable.
Graham is proposing a lifestyle of directed hedonism and to some extent implying that there is a rational basis for such an approach. [. ..] Hedonism of any kind is pretty limiting: of itself it will only lead to a more comfortable rut that in its comfort just gets deeper and deeper until its dank and dark walls start to close in. A life based on the challenges of self-transformation is just the opposite: it is all about breaking out of ruts; becoming somebody different with new and far horizons.
I think you might be mistaken in what the author is suggesting. Accusing him of recommending lives of pure hedonism is hardly fair.
From the Article. . .
Here's an upper bound: Do what you love doesn't mean, do what you would like to do most this second. Even Einstein probably had moments when he wanted to have a cup of coffee, but told himself he ought to finish what he was working on first.
It used to perplex me when I read about people who liked what they did so much that there was nothing they'd rather do. There didn't seem to be any sort of work I liked that much. If I had a choice of (a) spending the next hour working on something or (b) be teleported to Rome and spend the next hour wandering about, was there any sort of work I'd prefer? Honestly, no.
But the fact is, almost anyone would rather, at any given moment, float about in the Carribbean, or have sex, or eat some delicious food, than work on hard problems. The rule about doing what you love assumes a certain length of time. It doesn't mean, do what will make you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest over some longer period, like a week or a month.
Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. After a while you get tired of lying on the beach. If you want to stay happy, you have to do something.
It seems to me that you aren't really disagreeing with the author so much as phrasing it differently.
The area which I do tend to side with you is that the Author does not emphasize the requirement of struggle to reach a worthy goal. Though, I also doubt he would disagree.
Yes, pain and work are often required to achieve a worthy goal. "Fun", as I think it is meant here, might perhaps be better called, "Passion". --I know from experience that when my passion is fired up, I find myself excited by a certain challenge or possible reality I suddenly want to call into being. This is Fun! The work and the pain required to do this are an accepted price, but "Following Your Bliss," as Joseph Campbell tells us, and "Living on the Edge of Your Hysteria," as Ray Bradbury put it, and "Following a Path With Heart," as Carlos Castaneda's Don Juan advised us, are how a person might recognize which path is the right one to follow, and it is entirely noble to seek such paths. I don't think any of these people, including Paul Graham, are suggesting that people should become slothful hedonists. Not in the least!
I don't think any of us are on the wrong page here. I think we're just speaking using different languages about the same subject.
This is not about keeping kids safe. This is just another emotional appeal to make people jump in the desired direction of tighter social control. --We keep seeing these annoying, albeit effective tactics. "Ooooh, terrorists! Ooooh, shootings. Ooooh, anthrax. Oooh, pedophiles." Just pick a sore spot, press, and you can sell pretty much whatever you want by hitching your cart to the stampeding herd of frightened people. The government is good at this and they have been using the technique for ages to get what it wants, which is, of course, absolute control over everybody and everything.
Bush, after being caught for illegal wire tapping, turns around and uses an emotional appeal to get the big search engines to hand over their databases to catch, ("Ooooh") pedophiles! --Yahoo wants to fight pedophiles, they tell us, why doesn't Google want to fight pedophiles? The psychopath when caught in a lie or a crime simply tells another lie and commits another crime, all without batting an eyelash. Regular humans, who would be naturally ashamed of being caught, don't understand the psychopath's reaction and so assume that they, and not the psychopath, (Bush) are at fault somehow.
And for goodness sake! Bush, being a psychopath, means he's almost certainly engaged in sex crimes himself. The Washington political elite certainly have. . .
Bush and his cronies don't care about the wellbeing of ANYBODY but themselves. Heck, they have no problem bombing children, so why would they care about stopping pedophiles? Answer: They don't.
A government grant to help install bio-metrics in schools is there for one reason.
To be tagged is to be controlled. --What are tags for, other than to make sure you don't step outside boundaries which were laid down by somebody who wants to make sure you only step where they want you to step? --Somebody for you to submit to.
Now I dont need timecards or swipecards for employees. There are many ways to look at it. I am all for technology!
Swallowed that line with the hook, did you?
Why would somebody not want to be scanned and kept track of? Why would we not want our kids to grow up with the reality of paranoid, police-state control methods firmly ingrained in their brains?
You said yourself that you would love to not have to carry ID. Is that purely from a convenience stand-point, or is there another emotion bubbling down there inside you? Does any part of you feel that being kept track of is an insult. Does any part of you not want to growl, "I am not a bug. I am not a lab rat!"
Why on earth would anybody want to be tagged? To be tagged is to be controlled. --What are tags for other than to make sure you don't step outside the boundaries which were laid down by somebody who wants to make sure you only step where they want you to step. Somebody for you to submit to.
I don't know about everybody else, but I do not want to submit to anybody. --And I don't want our kids to learn that in our schools, (though it's rather too late for that). But in this case, it is especially disgusting, because the money for the project is coming from the government. The government are fascists, plain and simple, and they are barely hiding their intentions these days.
-FL
Ears Busting with Pod Buds. . .
on
Disney Buys Pixar
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Have you been sleeping for twenty years?:) Apple is one of the most recognizable brands on the planet. They've always had a major role in media production and once again are dominating many production areas, besides 3D. Suddenly happened with the iMac back in 98..
Zzzz -whazzit- I'm AWAKE! What did you say?
Oh. Well, there's a big difference between making cameras and making movies. Yeah, Apple has affected media production by selling tools, but now it's poised to cross the boundary in a somewhat more significant way than Buzzy Lightspeed, or whatever the character was called.
Jobs/Apple makes a brand new and very proprietary medium; Miniature TV sets. Jobs/Disney owns a behemoth of distribution plus a hundred and one property-rights. Hence, Mickey Mouse will be on iPods everywhere. Complete with adverts. Go, America!
I figure that, barring unforseen weirdness, it should only be a very short matter of time before the Pods will be part of the cell nets, with people eager to plunk down cash for high-speed access via microwaves. And then I'll have to shoot myself.
The prospect of a fast-cooked society of people walking around with their eyes and ears filled with the tender messages of the Beast at all times makes me feel all gushy inside, --though not so much in a warm & fuzzy manner as in a 'filled with worms' sort of way. I find it fitting that Apple and Disney are positioning themselves to be largely responsible fuzzing out the minds of the entire Western populace with electronic cotton candy. They're both happy-happy-bliss-bliss kinds of companies with too much shiny plastic and annoying function-removing fool-proofing. "Don't worry about our proprietary rights management system. You just listen to your music and we'll take care of everything for you."
Ugh.
And who the heck likes wearing head-phones anyway? No, seriously. . !
I never did like using Walkmans. They were certainly cool devices, but I could not stand having an artificial wall of noise separate me from reality. I only used my walkman because it seemed like the right thing to do after spending $200 on a portable tape player, but honestly. . . who actually feels good walking around in the world with their hearing deliberately rendered useless? Drove me bananas.
-FL
What the..? Now Apple is going to own All Media?
on
Disney Buys Pixar
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· Score: 1, Interesting
The Next Big Thing, as suggested by the bold new marketing frenzy which the media and advertising gurus and venture-capitalists poised on the periphery are salivating over can be summed up by the following quote recently overheard at the watering hole at your local Ad firm. . .
"For the entire month of December 2005, there was a new iPod being sold every 2 seconds!!"
--The idea, of course, being that iPods are suddenly this brand-new giant ten million user-huge market which Apple has unique content-control over, which in turn, it is supposed by the media gods, means that ten million people are just begging to be advertised at. Sadly, the logic is pretty solid. Ad driven content is on the way. (In economic bubble-form of course, which naturally will burst in a big messy splotch, but not before Apple has ballooned into something larger and even stranger than it already is. ..).
So Jobs now has a controlling hand over at Disney? When the heck did Apple become a world-shaping media-production company? Why wasn't I paying attention. Pixar kind of just crept up all quiet-like. When a big media company starts making good movies, it pays to watch out, because there's some big sneeze coming along a few years down the road!
And what a world it will be! Media and Advertising already smack of the same dumbed-down, candy-coated, lowest-common-denominator brain-goo which Apple has been peddling since the first Mac graced the scene. --That is, to people who like big glossy companies to do their thinking for them. (Ooooh, it's so hard to plug an inexpensive hard drive into an IDE port. Bite me.)
--And while we're at it, gag me with an iPod. What's next? Nuclear Devastation of a large American city at the hands of some Pentagon-funded fake-Islamic covert group? Well, yeah, but. . .
So unless it runs Linux in some flavor, Apple can go blow. I can't stand the idea of Apple having a direct line into the public subconscious. Ugh.
Think:
If you own and love your iPod, does that make you a, "Pod Person"? Well, duh. Of course it does. If the term 'Pod' doesn't twang the creepy-chord deep in your belly, then you're simply not paying attention, or you are and you've chosen to ignore the queezy body-snatchers vibe and opt into Stepford-ville with your eyes open. Congrats! --Anybody who doesn't respect metaphysical etymology is missing a whole mess of clues. . . iPod = "The Aliens have gained control of my brain by implanting a small device on my head. I am now very submissive. Allow me mod points, beloved overlord, in service of the empire. Fantastic Lad irritates us."
-FL
(Sorry. I've been frustrated lately by the shape of the world, and my posts have reflected this through a higher toxicity content. My apologies. I really do love you all. Well, most of you, anyway.)
Same deal, different values. The basic message being that, "Police are patient and good, while civilians are stupid and dangerous animals which need to be controlled." --And moreover, the message as regards to, Poor civilians.
If, for instance, a person watches COPS every week, then it is likely a low-level element of his/her thinking will voice itself through a strong emotional reaction when the idea of cutting back on police powers is brought to the table. When a neocon movement to further cut back on civil liberties and enact more Big Brother gestapo stuff, one of the building blocks of the public mind will be the public reality of the world as depicted by COPS. That building block, no matter how irrelevant or small a percentage it represents of a population's behavior, will hold an undue level of power in coloring the person's world view.
Joseph Goebbles depicted German Jews as vermin, showing scenes of rats racing through alley ways interspersed the scenes of Jews looking shifty. People watched this stuff, and made the emotional association of Jews with vermin. We've learned a lot since WWII. We've increased the effectiveness of the medium, (television versus film in its strobe effect, enhancing the absorption of the message). Now we know how to pin the 'desired' emotional value to a target population with much greater finesse, years in advance of the intended coup de gras.
A big problem is simply that they claim to bust myths, that myths need busting and that there are smart who don't believe in myths and stupid people who do, and that the TV People are the smart ones who should be trusted and emulated. Through this, people have their thinking subverted. --And it has less to do with crashing cars and splitting arrows. It has to do with the unstated walls of the prison in which those activities take place. When you watch television, the walls are just as much observed as are the dramas going on between them. On the Discovery Channel, is the male host wearing hot or cold colors? Is he seated above or below his female co-host? How do her mannerisms read versus his as he dictates the state of reality to her concerning vital subjects? --This stuff is regularly and deliberately manipulated and it goes in and it carries deep effect.
So many people are so very frightened of believing the 'wrong' things, and of being ostracized by society as a result, that television, and shows like Myth Busters, wield real power despite its goofiness.
--The basic undercurrent being that there are things we should feel embarrassed about considering or thinking of until the smart TV people with big budgets have validated everything for us. It links right in with the talking newsheads telling us how the world is, who is evil and who needs to be bombed, etc. --It wouldn't be such a problem if the TV didn't lull everybody who sits before one into a hypnotic state where all the information, right or wrong, gets buried deep in the subconscious, shaping our perceptions and behaviors and beliefs in ways we are barely even aware of but which manifest in very real ways.
I'll do my own experiments, thank-you very much. Television is most dangerous when it purports to tell us directly how reality works.
I don't know about Mr. Wizard, but I got my experiment fix by getting my hands dirty while trying to build stuff.
Zoning out in front of a TV is chumpy, and it opens your mind wide to accept a raft-load of garbage. It's not just what Mr. Wizard was saying about science, it's how he was dressed, how he behaved, how he treated his guests, and what the commercials in between were main-lining deep into your subconscious about the shape of reality and your function and thoughts within it, all while you sat in a hypnotic state. -Not to mention the half-hour of television before Mr. Wizard came on. And the half afterwards.
TV is a neat toy, and there's nothing wrong with experiencing it if you're willing to pay the price for how messed up your head will become as a direct result. But honestly, the whole concept of experimenting with the world is to actually experiment with the world! People, especially kids, should get their hands dirty on a regular basis. That's how we're designed to learn.
College is NOT a pre-requisite for success, happiness and excellence in this world. Anybody can become anything they want simply by following their gut instincts and their passions. Sometimes, their passions will indeed lead them through a school or two, but other times, their passions will lead them instead through jungles and over mountain tops. Nobody needs an expensive piece of paper to validate them or pave their way into the world.
But I bet you had a number of worry-warts trying to discourage you from jumping into the field you're in without first wasting a couple of years and piles of cash on post-secondary education.
Slashdot Mirror
The race of giants in the story, as depicted by genetically altered enforcers, are possibly analogous to the Nephilim, the race of 14 ft tall aliens scheduled to arrive sometime in the next five-ten years once the so-called 'apocalypse' is underway. Hm. I didn't make that connection before.
Also, that whole sequence of religious fools you meet half-way through the game, all spinning in misery are an interesting foot note as well. . . Particularly if my memory serves correctly, regarding their association with the giants through some kind of virus. --The Nephilim, whenever they show up in human history, (I believe 8-9000 years ago was the last occurrence), are presented to us as gods, when really they are just a bunch of aliens similarly enslaved and co-opted by the next race up the food chain. Inter-breeding through genetic engineering apparently is also a feature of the whole cycle.
"Fallout" is a very interesting dream sequence indeed! The subconscious yelling up from the depths with warnings. . .
-FL
It's not a particularly brilliant title. The game mechanics are a little weak in spots and there are a few bugs here and there. And yet. . . The game speaks to something in people in a very powerful way. . . Heck, I remember seeking it out, years after its initial release. I got it for about $15.00 packaged with Fallout2, and I don't even know how it entered my brain as a possible title to look for, but I remember waking up one day just knowing that I had to look for it and play the thing.
The first thing which struck me a couple of years afterwards was how the political picture of our current times was beginning to merge with the intro to Fallout. Cue it up and watch the intro movie on the disk again; "War. .
I sincerely hope that my fascination with the game doesn't mean I'm subconsciously preparing to survive the coming holocaust in that particular mode. --Worn black leather and a reliance on old shotgun shells doesn't strike me as a particularly fun way to exist.
Anyway. . .
Might as well add mine to the list of favorites from years past. . .
I don't own games anymore. Need to get work done. . .
-FL
Yeah? This is just Good cop, Bad cop. Guess what? They're all cops.
The people who have been hired to fool you are working with 50 years and billions of dollars in collective research into human psychology. The CIA claimed, after WWII, to have 'owned' all the major news and media outlets, that the information people were getting was all colored and tempered by them. The U.K. bears little difference in how its secret services manage its populations.
If people don't believe that their media is squeaky clean, then they will stop listening to the media. It pays, then, to stage these little events so that people are satisfied with the purity of their news source of choice.
Here's a recent example of the BBC acting as little more than a government mouthpiece, (and not even the British government). . .
As for the rest of your post, what the fuck are you on about? That has nothing to do with the subject at hand.
If you want to know what 'the fuck' I was on about, try re-reading the post. Seems simple enough. If you can't see the relevance to the subject at hand, you might try reading with your eyes open.
-FL
Hm. I generally only rag on people about poor spelling and grammar, etc., when I cannot understand what it is they are trying to say.
Sounds to me rather like you don't have anything intelligent to respond with to what I was putting forth. --But rather than admit this to me (or yourself), you prefer to sink to making unrelated attacks which border on the physically threatening. This behavior is sadly typical of the conservative mind-set. Conservatives are generally mentally or spiritually deficient in some very text-book manner.
But then, I'm making assumptions. Perhaps you just have trouble with adaptive reading comprehension.
-FL
He's a bigger loser than he was a decade ago.
Loser? When you're not in the game to 'win', losing only means not being able to continue playing.
One of my favorite personality types is the one which pisses off guys like you by not caring about winning or losing in the boring conventional terms so many people think hold validity. Creativity is everything. Greed is a disease. --This, I believe, is a Universal truth which shapes our reality, and once you figure it out, you can fly.
There's a reason why a fellow who has only 'conquered' 3% of the computer market is such a recognized name. It's because he's learned one of the key secrets of life; how to have fun while everybody else is agonizing over which way the ball is being kicked.
Who would you enjoy meeting more at a party? --A boring conservative money-getter, or a 'loser' who isn't scared to dream and get excited about it? All my friends are technically 'losers', but they live happily, without fear or want, and they light up the world. All the money-getters I've met, by contrast, are like pre-fab appliances with 2-dimensional social skills. These are the 'winners'. Hmm.
-FL
Because most people in their lives simply manage to get to work on time, do as they are instructed, and pay their taxes. This behavior pattern does not inspire much of anything to the casual on-looker.
Having a "vision" isn't uncommon. Uncommon, however, is the person who is brave and strong and skilled enough to go about realizing it.
Many people strive to be so capable, and thus they look up to those who have managed it. Role models are what they are for this reason, or so I think.
-FL
You don't come up with cool sayings like that unless you're right into it. (Or unless you have a great PR department, which I don't believe was the case).
My impression of Jobs is that he's simply entertaining his mania. --He sees possible futures where technology becomes an idealized, humanity-altering version of itself, and he's simply trying to realize this vision by following and then occupying what seem to him the obvious and inevitable steps.
Is he angling to go head-to-head with Microsoft? I doubt it. Guys like Jobs find reward and adrenalin rushes, etc., through realizing creative vision. Competition and the dark 'joy' of destroying competitors, and the 'joy' of collecting all the money in the world pale in comparison. Jobs is entirely capable of 'losing' to Gates, because winning and losing are of little importance when one's goal is merely to shape and advance. (Even if shaping and advancing mean being a control-freak, which is typical for people like Jobs. Nobody else can see it right or therefore do it right, so why muck about depending on others?)
Time for a little more metaphysical etymology. . .
"Gates" - Not quite the same as a door; doors can be opened and closed by regular individuals. A gate implies a door which is watched and controlled by somebody else, one which is designed to limit and control the flow of that which enters and exits. Bill exerts control over the flow of information.
"Jobs" - Tasks which need doing. Steve follows the work toward his peculiar vision, and then does it, no matter how ludicrous it may appear.
--His moves will at first seem irrational to the sharks, (and frustrated board members), because he likes to invest and play rather than invest and reap. But then when the circumstances are right and creativity blossoms, he suddenly seems like a genius.
My only trouble is that he's embraced the idea that people don't like to think outside certain boundaries and want to be coddled, which may well be true. This bothers me, because while he's out there changing the world, I have to live in it. --And I do not like to be coddled or to have somebody else do my thinking for me.
Candy-coated buttons piss me off. Complexity does not scare me.
-FL
So do you want your kid to grow up with a lot fewer life skills? Why not give him or her a video game-box to spend all those thousands of childhood growth hours on?
Heck, why not plug yourself into a game box as well? Why grow into a skilled and accomplished person with fine-tuned power over your emotional and spiritual being when you can be turning pixels on and off, over and over and over?
I know I'm being hypocritical here. . , I've wasted zillions of hours on video crack in my youth as well, and even learned a few useful skills and tactics doing so. --But I also built my own computer when I was a kid, went to creative lengths to pirate all my games, and most importantly, I didn't start until I was 12 years old. I'd wager that when today's kids are as old as my generation is now, they'll be generally much less socially aware and physically capable as a direct result of too much video crack when their young brains should be sucking up as much real-world experience as possible.
-FL
The idea of the BBC being propaganda is utterly ludicrous.
Utterly effective, actually. It certainly worked on you with near perfect results.
For goodness sake! The people who populate those boards of inquiry you mention are just as much mind-controlled to believe the lies as anybody else. Or they are controlled on a higher level wherein they deliberately work to create a false impression of justice in order to keep the people distracted from the truth of the matter; that Television exists for the primary purpose of population mind-control.
Have you ever asked yourself why the U.K. has a few hundred thousand surveillance cameras dotted throughout its cities? Or why the U.K. has one of the lowest standards of living for such an advanced industrialized nation? Or why the U.K. is one of the closest actualizations of Orwell's 1984 among the Western/European countries?
Controlling populations is the key. Keeping them locked down, miserable, ill-informed and yet willing to put up with it because they believe that TV is True, that the state of things is simply the way it is, and that nothing can be done to change it. Television lies. That's its job; to make you happy with your cage, to stop you from questioning. --And, of course, to make you knee-jerk with an automatic emotional response when somebody else does question the state of things.
Honestly. Only those who have been completely fooled would trust a television news program. Do you also believe that terrorists placed those bombs around London and that the British secret services didn't have a deliberate hand in perpetrating that debacle in order to keep the people frightened and fooled into supporting the government's enormously profitable war in the Middle East? --Profitable, that is, for military industrialist share-holders and their lapdogs in parliament. The public which pays for it all, however, gets to be taxed into oblivion.
So of COURSE they're going to own and use the media to make sure you stay mis-informed and proud of it. There's a LOT of money and power at stake.
-FL
I'm sorry, I RTFA, but I couldn't find a single argument in this BBC mouthpiece's screed which explains how doing as one is told by a dictator state is brave.
-FL
But, dude, your government can shoot you in the head for refusing to do insane things. (Which is not so different from my government.)
Governments are corrupt, stupid things which take our money and abuse their power for personal benefit.
I don't support my government and I certainly don't think you should support yours.
But then I also don't think cowardice or believing in propaganda is cool. --And believing that we are not being exposed to propaganda all the time from our own governments is simply foolhardy.
-FL
Thank you.
The BBC is also a psy-ops tool, so this article has a purpose and a design beyond telling the truth. --Because one of THE most important targets of a psyops war is your own population. It is essential to control the thinking of the masses if you want to keep those tax dollars flowing and your heads of state off the gallows.
-FL
Your data is incomplete. It is true that clever circles can be perpetrated by clever people, but there are simply too many anomalies to be accounted for. These include heat-burst nodules on the bend-points of the stalks, and those with perfect bends and no damange at all. --While the film does not get into examining why there are two different types, (those which interrupt the life process and those which do not), neither type can be accounted for by pranksters using basic physical force to bend stalks, techniques which cannot help but cause structural crushing and breaking damage to the plants.
Seeds from genuine circles will often display odd growth patterns when compared to control seeds from outside the circle.
There have been some instances where the plant-matter within a circle has been rendered magnetic. And other instances have seen enormously advanced circle formations appearing within twenty-minute windows between flights of air-bourn observers during the day.
There is a ton of strange evidence doucumented.
An excellent documentary film is available on the subject which is available at Block Buster, if you're interested. It's called, Crop Circles: Quest for Truth. It's well worth looking up. It has an interesting extra interview with one of the researchers who was threatened by the CIA to publicly denounce circles.
-FL
2. Atheism versus Bible thumping. This fight is a pointless distraction. The Bible-Thumpers are wrong but are also too lost in the cultic experience to grasp this. (And too easily propelled by the few dollops of mysterious energy crud which pop up now and again, and which for some bizarre reason the thumpers instantly take as validation of the divine rather than as outright manipulation. . . But I digress). Basically, the vast majority of people are fools, but to spend one's day making a big stink over it and coming up with clever arguments to prove the fact isn't going to make it go away. Lots of people also have communicable diseases. Same deal. It's a fact of life. Steer clear of their company if you don't want to deal with the infection. But don't get all huffy over it; nobody is going to praise you for smashing a faith-based argument with another faith based argument. It's just pointless and boring, especially when. . .
3. Nearly everybody likes to leave out a huge swath of significant data when dealing with the question of where we came from. Crop Circles and UFO's aren't swamp gas and jokers with planks, as anybody knows who has properly examined the subjects. There's a much larger and much more interesting equation here which nearly everybody runs like mad from rather than examine. . .
Leaving out puzzle pieces because they happen to make one feel uncomfortable will only lead to an image riddled with holes.
Now turn off the BBC.
-FL
That's the best excuse they could come up with?
What is this? Patent law? Copyright?
Sorry, but logically the primary concern should be the mechanics of the very system through which copyright and patent privileges are able to exist.
If you can't fix the machine because it won't let you look under the hood, then the machine is doomed.
But that's pretty basic reasoning. Diebold is bleeding in the water, I think. . .
Too bad it's happening in a state where electoral fraud is less likely. I wonder if that was planned so as to throw off doubts about Diebold's process when the results are finally laid bare to public examination. . . This should be happening in one of the swing states. Alaska???
Alaskan water is frozen. . .
Big media is all owned by the CIA. It's been that way since the second world war. This story is a waste of time. We all know the election was fraudulent. We all know Bush is a criminal.
Why is he not hanging from a tree?
-FL
I do not hate privacy.
Conflict?
Everybody will all have their own definitions of these words, which is of course natural. To understand what I am talking about here, please allow me to ask that you put your definitions aside for a moment so that I can paint the following image which might be useful to some of you. . .
Both Secrecy and Privacy are tools which use the same gate. The gate restricts information both in and out, allowing for a controlled flow in both directions so that the individual or group only have to deal with or share chosen information.
Privacy is based on the fact that there is some information which individuals or groups can't deal with, which would upset them so much that they would unravel or become endangered through knowing. Such information needs to be processed gently, internally, or released a bit at a time. You can't digest a whole turkey in one gulp. An oxygen burning flame is blown out when fed too much air too quickly. To facilitate healthy growth, Privacy is needed to make sure the individual or group is not overwhelmed or destroyed. Privacy does not intend to hold forever; only until it is no longer too hurtful or dangerous to share or allow in.
There is another type of intent, however, which uses the same tools but which has nothing to do with facilitating healthy growth. It has to do with avoiding spiritual growth and it has to do with controlling others for personal gain by withholding information. This is the essence of Secrecy.
The difference lies entirely in the Intent of the person or people making the choices on how the information gate is used. --Privacy exists to facilitate healthy growth, while Secrecy is there to stop or reverse growth.
I find Google's move disappointing.
Right when I was beginning to warm up to them for denying Bush access to their data base, they had to pull this nonsense.
-FL
Hm. I just skimmed it and I found it rather agreeable.
Graham is proposing a lifestyle of directed hedonism and to some extent implying that there is a rational basis for such an approach. [. .
I think you might be mistaken in what the author is suggesting. Accusing him of recommending lives of pure hedonism is hardly fair.
From the Article. . .
It seems to me that you aren't really disagreeing with the author so much as phrasing it differently.
The area which I do tend to side with you is that the Author does not emphasize the requirement of struggle to reach a worthy goal. Though, I also doubt he would disagree.
Yes, pain and work are often required to achieve a worthy goal. "Fun", as I think it is meant here, might perhaps be better called, "Passion". --I know from experience that when my passion is fired up, I find myself excited by a certain challenge or possible reality I suddenly want to call into being. This is Fun! The work and the pain required to do this are an accepted price, but "Following Your Bliss," as Joseph Campbell tells us, and "Living on the Edge of Your Hysteria," as Ray Bradbury put it, and "Following a Path With Heart," as Carlos Castaneda's Don Juan advised us, are how a person might recognize which path is the right one to follow, and it is entirely noble to seek such paths. I don't think any of these people, including Paul Graham, are suggesting that people should become slothful hedonists. Not in the least!
I don't think any of us are on the wrong page here. I think we're just speaking using different languages about the same subject.
-FL
Bush, after being caught for illegal wire tapping, turns around and uses an emotional appeal to get the big search engines to hand over their databases to catch, ("Ooooh") pedophiles! --Yahoo wants to fight pedophiles, they tell us, why doesn't Google want to fight pedophiles? The psychopath when caught in a lie or a crime simply tells another lie and commits another crime, all without batting an eyelash. Regular humans, who would be naturally ashamed of being caught, don't understand the psychopath's reaction and so assume that they, and not the psychopath, (Bush) are at fault somehow.
And for goodness sake! Bush, being a psychopath, means he's almost certainly engaged in sex crimes himself. The Washington political elite certainly have. . .
Conspiracy of Silence
A long history going back to Bush 41 and Reagan
Photographer tied to WH child sex-ring arrested after Thompson suicide
Bush and his cronies don't care about the wellbeing of ANYBODY but themselves. Heck, they have no problem bombing children, so why would they care about stopping pedophiles? Answer: They don't.
A government grant to help install bio-metrics in schools is there for one reason.
To be tagged is to be controlled. --What are tags for, other than to make sure you don't step outside boundaries which were laid down by somebody who wants to make sure you only step where they want you to step? --Somebody for you to submit to.
Do not submit.
-FL
Swallowed that line with the hook, did you?
Why would somebody not want to be scanned and kept track of? Why would we not want our kids to grow up with the reality of paranoid, police-state control methods firmly ingrained in their brains?
You said yourself that you would love to not have to carry ID. Is that purely from a convenience stand-point, or is there another emotion bubbling down there inside you? Does any part of you feel that being kept track of is an insult. Does any part of you not want to growl, "I am not a bug. I am not a lab rat!"
Why on earth would anybody want to be tagged? To be tagged is to be controlled. --What are tags for other than to make sure you don't step outside the boundaries which were laid down by somebody who wants to make sure you only step where they want you to step. Somebody for you to submit to.
I don't know about everybody else, but I do not want to submit to anybody. --And I don't want our kids to learn that in our schools, (though it's rather too late for that). But in this case, it is especially disgusting, because the money for the project is coming from the government. The government are fascists, plain and simple, and they are barely hiding their intentions these days.
-FL
Zzzz -whazzit- I'm AWAKE! What did you say?
Oh. Well, there's a big difference between making cameras and making movies. Yeah, Apple has affected media production by selling tools, but now it's poised to cross the boundary in a somewhat more significant way than Buzzy Lightspeed, or whatever the character was called.
Jobs/Apple makes a brand new and very proprietary medium; Miniature TV sets. Jobs/Disney owns a behemoth of distribution plus a hundred and one property-rights. Hence, Mickey Mouse will be on iPods everywhere. Complete with adverts. Go, America!
I figure that, barring unforseen weirdness, it should only be a very short matter of time before the Pods will be part of the cell nets, with people eager to plunk down cash for high-speed access via microwaves. And then I'll have to shoot myself.
The prospect of a fast-cooked society of people walking around with their eyes and ears filled with the tender messages of the Beast at all times makes me feel all gushy inside, --though not so much in a warm & fuzzy manner as in a 'filled with worms' sort of way. I find it fitting that Apple and Disney are positioning themselves to be largely responsible fuzzing out the minds of the entire Western populace with electronic cotton candy. They're both happy-happy-bliss-bliss kinds of companies with too much shiny plastic and annoying function-removing fool-proofing. "Don't worry about our proprietary rights management system. You just listen to your music and we'll take care of everything for you."
Ugh.
And who the heck likes wearing head-phones anyway? No, seriously. . !
I never did like using Walkmans. They were certainly cool devices, but I could not stand having an artificial wall of noise separate me from reality. I only used my walkman because it seemed like the right thing to do after spending $200 on a portable tape player, but honestly. . . who actually feels good walking around in the world with their hearing deliberately rendered useless? Drove me bananas.
-FL
"For the entire month of December 2005, there was a new iPod being sold every 2 seconds!!"
--The idea, of course, being that iPods are suddenly this brand-new giant ten million user-huge market which Apple has unique content-control over, which in turn, it is supposed by the media gods, means that ten million people are just begging to be advertised at. Sadly, the logic is pretty solid. Ad driven content is on the way. (In economic bubble-form of course, which naturally will burst in a big messy splotch, but not before Apple has ballooned into something larger and even stranger than it already is. .
So Jobs now has a controlling hand over at Disney? When the heck did Apple become a world-shaping media-production company? Why wasn't I paying attention. Pixar kind of just crept up all quiet-like. When a big media company starts making good movies, it pays to watch out, because there's some big sneeze coming along a few years down the road!
And what a world it will be! Media and Advertising already smack of the same dumbed-down, candy-coated, lowest-common-denominator brain-goo which Apple has been peddling since the first Mac graced the scene. --That is, to people who like big glossy companies to do their thinking for them. (Ooooh, it's so hard to plug an inexpensive hard drive into an IDE port. Bite me.)
--And while we're at it, gag me with an iPod. What's next? Nuclear Devastation of a large American city at the hands of some Pentagon-funded fake-Islamic covert group? Well, yeah, but. . .
So unless it runs Linux in some flavor, Apple can go blow. I can't stand the idea of Apple having a direct line into the public subconscious. Ugh.
Think:
If you own and love your iPod, does that make you a, "Pod Person"? Well, duh. Of course it does. If the term 'Pod' doesn't twang the creepy-chord deep in your belly, then you're simply not paying attention, or you are and you've chosen to ignore the queezy body-snatchers vibe and opt into Stepford-ville with your eyes open. Congrats! --Anybody who doesn't respect metaphysical etymology is missing a whole mess of clues. . . iPod = "The Aliens have gained control of my brain by implanting a small device on my head. I am now very submissive. Allow me mod points, beloved overlord, in service of the empire. Fantastic Lad irritates us."
-FL
(Sorry. I've been frustrated lately by the shape of the world, and my posts have reflected this through a higher toxicity content. My apologies. I really do love you all. Well, most of you, anyway.)
Same deal, different values. The basic message being that, "Police are patient and good, while civilians are stupid and dangerous animals which need to be controlled." --And moreover, the message as regards to, Poor civilians.
If, for instance, a person watches COPS every week, then it is likely a low-level element of his/her thinking will voice itself through a strong emotional reaction when the idea of cutting back on police powers is brought to the table. When a neocon movement to further cut back on civil liberties and enact more Big Brother gestapo stuff, one of the building blocks of the public mind will be the public reality of the world as depicted by COPS. That building block, no matter how irrelevant or small a percentage it represents of a population's behavior, will hold an undue level of power in coloring the person's world view.
Joseph Goebbles depicted German Jews as vermin, showing scenes of rats racing through alley ways interspersed the scenes of Jews looking shifty. People watched this stuff, and made the emotional association of Jews with vermin. We've learned a lot since WWII. We've increased the effectiveness of the medium, (television versus film in its strobe effect, enhancing the absorption of the message). Now we know how to pin the 'desired' emotional value to a target population with much greater finesse, years in advance of the intended coup de gras.
-FL
A big problem is simply that they claim to bust myths, that myths need busting and that there are smart who don't believe in myths and stupid people who do, and that the TV People are the smart ones who should be trusted and emulated. Through this, people have their thinking subverted. --And it has less to do with crashing cars and splitting arrows. It has to do with the unstated walls of the prison in which those activities take place. When you watch television, the walls are just as much observed as are the dramas going on between them. On the Discovery Channel, is the male host wearing hot or cold colors? Is he seated above or below his female co-host? How do her mannerisms read versus his as he dictates the state of reality to her concerning vital subjects? --This stuff is regularly and deliberately manipulated and it goes in and it carries deep effect.
So many people are so very frightened of believing the 'wrong' things, and of being ostracized by society as a result, that television, and shows like Myth Busters, wield real power despite its goofiness.
--The basic undercurrent being that there are things we should feel embarrassed about considering or thinking of until the smart TV people with big budgets have validated everything for us. It links right in with the talking newsheads telling us how the world is, who is evil and who needs to be bombed, etc. --It wouldn't be such a problem if the TV didn't lull everybody who sits before one into a hypnotic state where all the information, right or wrong, gets buried deep in the subconscious, shaping our perceptions and behaviors and beliefs in ways we are barely even aware of but which manifest in very real ways.
I'll do my own experiments, thank-you very much. Television is most dangerous when it purports to tell us directly how reality works.
Television lies.
-FL
Zoning out in front of a TV is chumpy, and it opens your mind wide to accept a raft-load of garbage. It's not just what Mr. Wizard was saying about science, it's how he was dressed, how he behaved, how he treated his guests, and what the commercials in between were main-lining deep into your subconscious about the shape of reality and your function and thoughts within it, all while you sat in a hypnotic state. -Not to mention the half-hour of television before Mr. Wizard came on. And the half afterwards.
TV is a neat toy, and there's nothing wrong with experiencing it if you're willing to pay the price for how messed up your head will become as a direct result. But honestly, the whole concept of experimenting with the world is to actually experiment with the world! People, especially kids, should get their hands dirty on a regular basis. That's how we're designed to learn.
-FL
But I bet you had a number of worry-warts trying to discourage you from jumping into the field you're in without first wasting a couple of years and piles of cash on post-secondary education.
Congrats!
-FL