Would it benefit them and their parents? Absolutely!
Define 'benefit'.
Why do the ignorant always post anonymously on this kind of subject? --And come to think of it, why so often with crappy language skills and in this case, dumb HTML usage? Is there a link between ignorance in how to communicate and ignorance in how the education system works? Hmm. . . Is ignorance a general, cross-discipline malaise which contaminates the afflicted on more than one level, I wonder?
Almost makes me wish I was back in school just so I could use such ideas to screw with the system!
As an adult, the penalties for thumbing one's nose at the matrix can include all manner of very bad things.
I read an interesting story about the kids during Hitler's Germany. --After the Nazi Youth had grown up a bit, the kids coming up after them rejected the propaganda and became a huge problem for the government. --And not in the nice Judy Blume way. There were actually public executions of some of the kids who were seen as being leaders among the youth, which of course, did nothing but inflame things. Only a teen-ager can be over-dramatic and passionate and driven in such ways. Nobody ever hears about this side of the war within Germany at that time, and it was a huge, huge factor, eventually doing more to mess things up from the inside than Allied bombing from without.
This gives me a ray of hope for the future of America. --Though, through MTV and cell-phones and junk-food, etc., the controllers are doing everything in their power to pre-emptively nip that bud before it ever grows. But I have faith in chaos. The good guys don't always win, but in a pinch a bit of tin-foil in the washroom can go a long way.
I don't even find it ironic that the Tin Foil Hatters will be the ones to carry hope forward. Just predictable. The non-conformists who look and think and concern themselves with unpleasant possibilities rather than run blind with the herd. . , they will be the ones who will also be able to see and jump out of the way while everybody else walks blind into the slaughterhouse. ..
I would not be the person I am happy to be today if I'd not been able to buck the system and grow and learn as I saw fit. This included thinking adults and their education system and agenda-driven curriculum was for the birds. It also included thumbing my nose at the rule system, skipping hundreds of hours worth of classes, causing some minor property damage, telling the teachers what I thought of the system and why I thought it, and then going on to be successful and happy in life. This drove most of the teachers and controllers completely nuts, as was deserved. --Teachers, minus those note-worthy exceptions, are among the most clued-out people on the planet. Born in insulated, middle-income suburban families, growing up through twenty years of school and then given teaching positions directly from graduation. . . Basically, these are people who never left Starfleet and often have the most warped view on how reality works. It becomes the kid's responsibility to discern the lies from the reality they must inhabit after leaving the halls of indoctrination, and most fail miserably because it is a natural inclination from birth to listen to and trust their elders, which in this case is a giant mistake.
If my school had tried to collar me with an RFID tag when I was in my teens, and feed me some bullshit about how it was right and proper for them to do so. . . Well, it would have been a call for me to mess with their system as badly as possible, up to and including getting expelled. Or shot.
Kids are not packages, and they are not inherently stupid. They come into life, each with a personal plan and mission; they know what this mission is by following the direction indicated by their inspiration and passions. Oppressive control systems, drugs, shitty food, mind-fogging EM devices, television. . , all of that crap is designed to knock people off their paths and keep humanity in a ditch. Often, I think the anger and frustration kids feel is a direct response to the amount of adult stupidity in the world and the lack of real society. I know, had I been given role models worthy of respect and a good system to work and learn within, I wouldn't have been a 'problem' kid for the administration.
Anyway, I suspect you must be trolling, but in case you are not, this is my honest reaction to your post.
Oh, my! Fantastic Lad. Did you get tired of Kuro5hin, or did they get tired of you? Did you have a concrete argument to present for us here, in all its carefully thought out glory, or is this just another stream of bullshit? How could I tell if it was?
Yaay!
Don't ask me why, but I love it when I run into old acquaintances! I hope you are well!
Kuro5hin was good for a while, but I drifted into Slashdot for some reason. No concrete reason.
Indeed, my concrete arguments are yours to have if you really want one, but I'm afraid the bullshit factor in my words is largely a symptom of the reader's perception. You seem to know what you want to think, so I expect everything I say will stink and steam rather too much for you, so why bother? I just like to play the other side for anybody who might read the threads around here. I think my original points from the previous post are still perfectly valid. Or full of shit depending on the color of your sunglasses.
I can only think that you did not read the source website, and that your belief system holds at its center a very dear sacred cow in regard to what is and is not possible in reality. The tenets of quantum physics support this kind of research. Why don't you?
You might be cautioned that there is a type of person who cries out as loudly and with such ignorance, (and with such use of all caps). They are called Religious Nuts.
This experiment could not net any results at all if they were using, and indeed, if it were even possible, to derive truly random numbers from a generator which could not be influenced by any outside source. This is the founding stone upon which the whole experiment is based; that streams of events generated at different points all over the globe can all at the same time show odd behavior. Of course something must be affecting the number generators, otherwise this observation would simply not occur. The question the researchers are posing is, "What?"
I don't see any reason why should this pose such a massive problem for some people unless it happens to be butting up against an overly sensitive article of pre-established Faith in what is and is not possible. In your case, it would certainly go some distance in explaining the long and impassioned post you left.
Read the material provided on the university website. It's a very simple thing to grasp.
As for the observations being useless. . . If something cannot be applied to a limited and pre-defined problem, does it invalidate the finding? The experiment suggests something very intresting about how reality works. Exploration and science is about far more than securing mineral rights and patents.
If anything, your observation ought to suggest some validity with regard to the subject.
The general idea is that, "All things are linked in a much broader sense than is explained by current orthodox science." This doesn't necessarily mean there is any magic involved. Being able to label some of the ways random number generation might be affected does not make the phenomenon of planet-wide number spiking cease to exist. Temperature, radiation, EM bursts, light pollution affecting non-random spikes in number generators placed at different points around the globe? That should make anybody curious all by itself even without Tsunami and WTC's collapsing when the spikes occur.
Oh, and of course, it's no trick to look back and find a spike AFTER a momentous event.
This argument is pointless and over-used. "Just because there appears to be a link does not mean there is a link" is certainly a valid observation, but I find it very remarkable that people almost never seem to understand that the opposite position is also just as true. This effectively invalidates the logical usefulness of this observation in any kind of debate.
Just because cold reading works, doesn't mean that all things are read cold.
It's a variation on the famous broken logic, "All cows are animals, therefore all animals are cows."
I can see nothing scientific regarding this "research" whatsoever. Not in methods, not in interpretation. Thus, I can not treat it as having any scientific meaning or implication.
Time to elicit the, "But I did read the research, wise-ass!" response, (as he quickly back-tracks to do so and thereby cover his ass. ..)
If you couldn't, as you claim, see any scientific approach "whatsoever", then you are either blind or you don't know what science is. Did you try actually reading the mountains of material provided by the researchers or are you acting on Faith in your own Beliefs about how the world works when you wrote your canned response?
Oh and before you ask I dont know why they killed the Postal Worker but your obvious interest in him proves my assertion about how nobody cares about the Jews.
Any unusual wording in an often used phrase is going to create interest and is not indicative of anything else, nor should it be used as an emotional ploy to create a feeling of guilt. For example. ..
"An estimated 3 million Gypsies, non-Jewish Poles and non-Jewish Russians and one House Painter were killed in the holocaust."
--This sentence carries about the same effect as the Postal Worker example, (or rather, it would do if those 3 million deaths had also publicized to the point of public de-sensitization so that the idea has become so old and tired that a House Painter can stand out.)
Not care about the Jews? Nonsense. I care about everybody. The Jews are just a subset of everybody. There have been many genocides, and to suggest that one genocide is more important and special than another suggests that one people are more important and special than another. And that kind of thinking is exactly what leads to genocide in the first place.
The sins of the fathers should never be bourn or paid for by the children. The cycle of abuse is well documented, and I think it applies to more than just parenting.
This question continues to bother me in a subterranean kind of way.
I think the answer lies in three things:
1. The dis-connectedness of society; neighbors are no longer the people you know. Cities and societies are filled with faceless people. It's hard to organize anything when people have lost emotional and social connection with each other.
2. The Dream. Truth, especially these days, is scary and unsettling. It is much easier in the short game to pretend that everything is okay. To ignore it all and get on with your life. There is certainly enough soothing illusion and lie provided to help us all along in that endeavor, as well as demonstrations of just how 'futile' it is to resist.
3. The Poison. The very things many people are struggling to ignore are the same things which are also bleeding them of the vital awareness and energy required to act. Monsanto alone makes several commonly consumed products which actively deteriorate one's ability to think and function.
The solution?
Each individual must choose to embrace awareness and to grow and strengthen themselves. At the moment it is still possible to do this.
Curiously, the more difficult it becomes to remain free and the more effort the Powers That Be put into controlling the world, the more unstable the equation becomes. When Free Choice has been removed to a high enough degree, the world shakes itself off. --A fail-safe, re-set mechanism. It has happened before many times, and it started happening again a few years ago. The process is quickly gaining strength. It'll be interesting to see how it all goes down this time around.
I had a walkie-talkie, and a phone and I sat in a booth and told people where the washroom and movie theaters were. Yes, that guy. Yes, it sucked.
Anyway, the reason I bring this up is this; there was a mall policy; No Cameras! If anybody was seen taking pictures, mall security would swoop down on them and prevent them. Nobody ever explained why this policy was in place, and at the time, (I was young and still learning how the world worked), I honestly didn't care. Furthermore, I got this weird thrill when I caught somebody and had the opportunity to call it in on the com-system like a three alarm fire. Everybody got a buzz off it. "But why?" "Mall policy! Are you making trouble?"
I'm not even sure if anybody knew the reasons for this weird law enforcement. All anybody knew was that recording images was bad, bad, bad.
Now, today I could probably think up a couple of reasons why this policy existed, but so what? It doesn't mean a damned thing. Lawyers and politicians have demonstrated time and again that it is entirely possible to come up with rational-sounding reasons for all manner of insane activities and thus get people to accept and go along with them. It happens all the time, and I'm sure everybody can think up an example or twenty.
The point I found curious is how eerily easy it is to jump whole-heartedly onto the enforcement bandwagon for no other reason than one happens to have been given a symbol of authority. A walkie-talkie, in this case.
Soldiers will open fire on un-armed demonstrators, their own neighbors, and they will continue to do so because humans are wired in a creepy way. The trick is recognizing this face and taking steps to navigate accordingly.
Yeah, I saw that, but it certainly wasn't one of the various links I checked out. --I figured, "Base Technology" would send me to a page filled with hyroglyphics and obscure technical references. Like I said; typical geek design flaw.
To make the page genuinely useful, a simple banner on the main page saying, "The 'X' Unix GUI" would have been enough. Then a "What Is X?" button might also be a good option. Hiding what you are under, "Base Technology" is about intuitive as a strait jacket in a clothing store.
And I notice I've been modded 'Troll'. All I said was the page was badly designed, my reasons for thinking so, and I asked what the hell X was. That's only a troll for people with low self-esteem. Jeez.
Neoteny, (I don't understand the linguistics behind your term, but it's as good a label as any for 'appearing harmless and friendly'), combined with lethality when necessary is a great defense mechanism. --As one friend used to laugh when in the U.S. "Don't fuck with us, or we'll come and burn down your White House. Again."
Brute military in large numbers (the U.S. way) means exactly nothing when a small team of less than ten men with advanced hardware and ninja training (the Canadian way) can erase large armies as if they weren't there. Nobody talks about this. I am breaking code.
But then the U.S. doesn't care about effective militaries. It cares about controlling its population through enslaving all the people to military service and the war support industry. It's about social control through military structure rather than actually being able to kill your enemies effectively. (As we are seeing in Iraq. What a joke. --If anybody really wanted to take out the leadership in Baghdad, it could have been done quickly, quietly and nearly invisibly with very few casualties. It's been done before. --Big armies racing in and blowing everything up and then not being able to maintain control is unbelievably stupid. --Unless your goal is to create a giant quagmire through which to funnel lots of money and fuck up your country and stay in power. Hmm.)
I'd crow and say that Canada is one of the smartest and most dangerous countries on the face of the earth, but a bunch of beer drinking hockey players would kick my ass for talking.
Don't worry, though. We're all about survival and getting along happily with our friends all over the world. We don't have any interest in conquest. That's for schoolyard bullies, which we're not.
Even though it's still mostly based on a bunch of bullshit dogma and nationalistic rhetoric, and even though our government is run by the usual corrupt suspects, I'm actually quite proud to be Canadian. It'll be interesting to see if our groundwork is strong enough to withstand the black hole of the U.S. If our shit-head PM manages to get Canada to throw in with this missile defense bullshit, as well as the insane plan to bring both Canadian and U.S. armed forces under one command, I'll be seriously considering a move to France.
Are you honestly arguing that the system presented in this logic puzzle is the only rational or valid one in existence?
They're pirates. Back-stabbing was the rule. But so, I believe, was the concept of 'fairly shared booty'. --What kind of retard pirate would set sail knowing they weren't going to get fairly compensated for risking their lives? (Well, other than U.S. soldiers who are not getting paid $1000 an hour like the corporate mercenaries doing the same job in the next oil-field over.) --Feed a bunch of 'civil society' bullshit to the kids, and you've got yourself an army of idiots willing to throw their lives away for 1 gold piece while the rest of us live off the fat. Ugly but true.
In other words, you're more than welcome to serve under me on my ship! Bring your friends, too! If they all think the way you do, then they'll grudgingly let me rip them off without raising a fuss, thinking that they are performing a noble act to prevent 'social anarchy' or some such nonsense.
This is why they teach kids dumb logic puzzles; to keep the salt mines peopled with chumps who do as they are told and actually think they are smart while doing so. And it's also why the elite have no trouble killing people off. They probably feel like I do right now; "If he's that daft, then he deserves to eat the NutraSweet!"
Another ultra-fluffy pirate world drawn in simple cartoon faces which is nonetheless broad and popular.
I can't figure out the life metaphor here. --Though, 'One Piece' (the manga series) was peopled with endless reams of charismatic sociopaths in search of treasure who were hard-wired to back-stab friends or stand up for comrades only when it could better their own lot. The whole thing traded on a very primitive understanding of morality.
Perhaps the metaphor here is as follows: The current world is a pretend artifice, (Happy faces and meaningless puzzle challenges), where pillage and poor ethics are rewarded, (Pirates), and where there is a larger world of politics which don't matter, because the whole reality is nothing more than a computer game where the real masters remain unseen, remain generally un-referred to, and whose entire purpose for providing and maintaining the game is to extract energy/money from the users populating the artificial environment.
Not a bad thing, necessarily, but an accurate picture of reality invitro.
I remember disecting this puzzle on Slashdot a couple of months ago.
I like the Monte Hall puzzle better, because it's less broken.
In real (pirate) life, if I was a low-ranking pirate in this logic game, I'd walk away with 25 gold and leave behind one dead senior pirate because I know how to make a side-deal which includes, "And after we kill the blighter, we stop messing around with this stupid voting nonsense. It's this way, or we all get screwed by so-called, 'logic'."
Game theory only works in controlled environments, (like computer simulations). In the real world of global politics, it only screws those who agree to play by the set rules, which is pretty damned stupid, considering where the rules come from. This is directly linked to such sayings as Tacitus' "The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws."
A) When they were going to get sued either by id, or by the Aliens franchise holders.
B) When either id or the Aliens franchise holders would get around to ripping off and re-publishing the same game without giving royalties.
It might have been the friends I was with, or it might have been the vibe in the room at the time, but Spacehulk was easily one of the most entertaining board games I've ever played. And the fact that everybody could play co-operatively against a common alien threat put it right over the top with me. --I have a hard time enjoying games which pit friends against friends. I find such things make for unhappy energy in the room. The people I compete with in life are called "Enemies", and I do not eat pizza and watch movies with them.
That episode where they would arrest people based purely on matching personality records to crime profiles. I believe this only happened to people who had bad credit records. (Why punish consumers when there are non-contributing blanks taking up space in the Corporate machine?)
That show was visionary, and to think that it was a spin-off from a Coke-ad character. (Or am I remembering that incorrectly? It was twenty years ago, after all!)
if the cracker had been a regular guy who called up to point out this flaw in a weak system, he'd have been arrested and charged and locked away forever and ever.
As it is, I bet the auto company is grinding its teeth and swearing, "Curse you, Johns Hopkinses! We'd sue you if you weren't Johns Hopkinses. Nasty, little Johns Hopkinses!"
The Fulan Gong is a bullshit cult which bases itself on two things. ..
1. A wide support base filled with naive members given lots of good credos and compassionate spiritual laws to follow so that they seem altruistic and nourishing and all that good stuff while they spread their belief system.
2. When you get deeper into their literature, (and not even that much deeper), you discover that the higher end of the cult bases itself on the grafting of a 'Fulan', an energy being, onto one's own energy in return for 'special powers'. --Grafting an energy being into your own energy is fucking creepy, and I have never heard of any such case which is not parasitic in nature. It's just another energetic feeding arrangement designed to screw humans. It is all the more shocking in a place like China, where where everybody knows about energy and chi and doesn't dispute that reality. They know about demons and they know about energy vampirism. So what the hell? --A demon called by any other name is still a fucking demon. How dumb do you have to be to fall for basic re-wording and PR gloss?
And that's what it is. The Fulan Gong, like any cult worth its salt, has a very well orchestrated self-promotion and public relations arm. Like Israel, the Fulan Gong likes to make a very big deal about it's own persecution.
The fact of the matter is that there have been MANY spiritual groups which have been savaged by the government in China. --And many of them are far, far more legitimate than the Fulan Gong. I'm no fan of Facism, but the Fulan Gong is just another dangerous lie and it can go rot. I sympathize with the pains suffered by its ignorant followers; their stories really are tragic, but on the other hand. . . I really wish people would read and think for two minutes about the literature offered by a cult before joining it. Membership in any of the stupid religions to which most of this world belongs would be non-existent if people used their brains. Christianity, Judaism, Islam. . , they're all dumb and dangerous lies desgined to misdirect and bleed humans. --Witness the world today!
An interesting side-note. . . High level Scientologists are also into grafting energy beings directly onto its followers, but they're savy enough to conceal that fact and base their whole bullshit cult on secrets; you don't know what the heck you've really joined until you've been a (paying) member for fifteen years! Any spiritual group which as a policy keeps secrets from people making inquiries out of genuine interest should automatically be avoided.
Some pharma company came up with mice which had the same type of blood cells as humans. Or something like that. They cost more than regular mice, but they were front page news, like eight years ago or so. They were patented and all that.
Who the heck cares?
Every time you pick a mate, you're messing with DNA.
Well, actually. . , the problem is that the control belongs to soulless corps. How long until they start breeding dumber humans with a gene which makes people reflexively want to Buy Useless Crap. Or react poorly to non-GM foods. Or work smarter with fewer complaints. Oh, the list is endless in a lame sci-fi kind of way.
The comforting thing is that they never paid much attention to anything but the most trivial 'augmented soldier' nonsense on Star Trek, which leads me to think that it's probably not much of a problem we'll be needing to make any choices about in our current reality. There's not really enough time left to worry about this kind of thing. --The damage was done back when humans were first written. (Clever adjustments were made, such as linking sexual pleasure to violence, and activating the capacity for a strong sense of jealousy. Among other things.)
Slashdot Mirror
Define 'benefit'.
Why do the ignorant always post anonymously on this kind of subject? --And come to think of it, why so often with crappy language skills and in this case, dumb HTML usage? Is there a link between ignorance in how to communicate and ignorance in how the education system works? Hmm. . . Is ignorance a general, cross-discipline malaise which contaminates the afflicted on more than one level, I wonder?
It's just a thought. .
-FL
As an adult, the penalties for thumbing one's nose at the matrix can include all manner of very bad things.
I read an interesting story about the kids during Hitler's Germany. --After the Nazi Youth had grown up a bit, the kids coming up after them rejected the propaganda and became a huge problem for the government. --And not in the nice Judy Blume way. There were actually public executions of some of the kids who were seen as being leaders among the youth, which of course, did nothing but inflame things. Only a teen-ager can be over-dramatic and passionate and driven in such ways. Nobody ever hears about this side of the war within Germany at that time, and it was a huge, huge factor, eventually doing more to mess things up from the inside than Allied bombing from without.
This gives me a ray of hope for the future of America. --Though, through MTV and cell-phones and junk-food, etc., the controllers are doing everything in their power to pre-emptively nip that bud before it ever grows. But I have faith in chaos. The good guys don't always win, but in a pinch a bit of tin-foil in the washroom can go a long way.
I don't even find it ironic that the Tin Foil Hatters will be the ones to carry hope forward. Just predictable. The non-conformists who look and think and concern themselves with unpleasant possibilities rather than run blind with the herd. . , they will be the ones who will also be able to see and jump out of the way while everybody else walks blind into the slaughterhouse. .
-FL
I would not be the person I am happy to be today if I'd not been able to buck the system and grow and learn as I saw fit. This included thinking adults and their education system and agenda-driven curriculum was for the birds. It also included thumbing my nose at the rule system, skipping hundreds of hours worth of classes, causing some minor property damage, telling the teachers what I thought of the system and why I thought it, and then going on to be successful and happy in life. This drove most of the teachers and controllers completely nuts, as was deserved. --Teachers, minus those note-worthy exceptions, are among the most clued-out people on the planet. Born in insulated, middle-income suburban families, growing up through twenty years of school and then given teaching positions directly from graduation. . . Basically, these are people who never left Starfleet and often have the most warped view on how reality works. It becomes the kid's responsibility to discern the lies from the reality they must inhabit after leaving the halls of indoctrination, and most fail miserably because it is a natural inclination from birth to listen to and trust their elders, which in this case is a giant mistake.
If my school had tried to collar me with an RFID tag when I was in my teens, and feed me some bullshit about how it was right and proper for them to do so. . . Well, it would have been a call for me to mess with their system as badly as possible, up to and including getting expelled. Or shot.
Kids are not packages, and they are not inherently stupid. They come into life, each with a personal plan and mission; they know what this mission is by following the direction indicated by their inspiration and passions. Oppressive control systems, drugs, shitty food, mind-fogging EM devices, television. . , all of that crap is designed to knock people off their paths and keep humanity in a ditch. Often, I think the anger and frustration kids feel is a direct response to the amount of adult stupidity in the world and the lack of real society. I know, had I been given role models worthy of respect and a good system to work and learn within, I wouldn't have been a 'problem' kid for the administration.
Anyway, I suspect you must be trolling, but in case you are not, this is my honest reaction to your post.
-FL
Carry on then. You can look all you want. Take all you need to believe. There's no rush.
-FL
Yaay!
Don't ask me why, but I love it when I run into old acquaintances! I hope you are well!
Kuro5hin was good for a while, but I drifted into Slashdot for some reason. No concrete reason.
Indeed, my concrete arguments are yours to have if you really want one, but I'm afraid the bullshit factor in my words is largely a symptom of the reader's perception. You seem to know what you want to think, so I expect everything I say will stink and steam rather too much for you, so why bother? I just like to play the other side for anybody who might read the threads around here. I think my original points from the previous post are still perfectly valid. Or full of shit depending on the color of your sunglasses.
Cheers to you, and have a great evening!
-FL
You might be cautioned that there is a type of person who cries out as loudly and with such ignorance, (and with such use of all caps). They are called Religious Nuts.
-FL
This experiment could not net any results at all if they were using, and indeed, if it were even possible, to derive truly random numbers from a generator which could not be influenced by any outside source. This is the founding stone upon which the whole experiment is based; that streams of events generated at different points all over the globe can all at the same time show odd behavior. Of course something must be affecting the number generators, otherwise this observation would simply not occur. The question the researchers are posing is, "What?"
I don't see any reason why should this pose such a massive problem for some people unless it happens to be butting up against an overly sensitive article of pre-established Faith in what is and is not possible. In your case, it would certainly go some distance in explaining the long and impassioned post you left.
-FL
As for the observations being useless. . . If something cannot be applied to a limited and pre-defined problem, does it invalidate the finding? The experiment suggests something very intresting about how reality works. Exploration and science is about far more than securing mineral rights and patents.
-FL
If anything, your observation ought to suggest some validity with regard to the subject.
The general idea is that, "All things are linked in a much broader sense than is explained by current orthodox science." This doesn't necessarily mean there is any magic involved. Being able to label some of the ways random number generation might be affected does not make the phenomenon of planet-wide number spiking cease to exist. Temperature, radiation, EM bursts, light pollution affecting non-random spikes in number generators placed at different points around the globe? That should make anybody curious all by itself even without Tsunami and WTC's collapsing when the spikes occur.
Oh, and of course, it's no trick to look back and find a spike AFTER a momentous event.
This argument is pointless and over-used. "Just because there appears to be a link does not mean there is a link" is certainly a valid observation, but I find it very remarkable that people almost never seem to understand that the opposite position is also just as true. This effectively invalidates the logical usefulness of this observation in any kind of debate.
Just because cold reading works, doesn't mean that all things are read cold.
It's a variation on the famous broken logic, "All cows are animals, therefore all animals are cows."
Look deeper and you will see.
-FL
Time to elicit the, "But I did read the research, wise-ass!" response, (as he quickly back-tracks to do so and thereby cover his ass. .
If you couldn't, as you claim, see any scientific approach "whatsoever", then you are either blind or you don't know what science is. Did you try actually reading the mountains of material provided by the researchers or are you acting on Faith in your own Beliefs about how the world works when you wrote your canned response?
-FL
Any unusual wording in an often used phrase is going to create interest and is not indicative of anything else, nor should it be used as an emotional ploy to create a feeling of guilt. For example. .
"An estimated 3 million Gypsies, non-Jewish Poles and non-Jewish Russians and one House Painter were killed in the holocaust."
--This sentence carries about the same effect as the Postal Worker example, (or rather, it would do if those 3 million deaths had also publicized to the point of public de-sensitization so that the idea has become so old and tired that a House Painter can stand out.)
Not care about the Jews? Nonsense. I care about everybody. The Jews are just a subset of everybody. There have been many genocides, and to suggest that one genocide is more important and special than another suggests that one people are more important and special than another. And that kind of thinking is exactly what leads to genocide in the first place.
The sins of the fathers should never be bourn or paid for by the children. The cycle of abuse is well documented, and I think it applies to more than just parenting.
-FL
This question continues to bother me in a subterranean kind of way.
I think the answer lies in three things:
1. The dis-connectedness of society; neighbors are no longer the people you know. Cities and societies are filled with faceless people. It's hard to organize anything when people have lost emotional and social connection with each other.
2. The Dream. Truth, especially these days, is scary and unsettling. It is much easier in the short game to pretend that everything is okay. To ignore it all and get on with your life. There is certainly enough soothing illusion and lie provided to help us all along in that endeavor, as well as demonstrations of just how 'futile' it is to resist.
3. The Poison. The very things many people are struggling to ignore are the same things which are also bleeding them of the vital awareness and energy required to act. Monsanto alone makes several commonly consumed products which actively deteriorate one's ability to think and function.
The solution?
Each individual must choose to embrace awareness and to grow and strengthen themselves. At the moment it is still possible to do this.
Curiously, the more difficult it becomes to remain free and the more effort the Powers That Be put into controlling the world, the more unstable the equation becomes. When Free Choice has been removed to a high enough degree, the world shakes itself off. --A fail-safe, re-set mechanism. It has happened before many times, and it started happening again a few years ago. The process is quickly gaining strength. It'll be interesting to see how it all goes down this time around.
-FL
Anyway, the reason I bring this up is this; there was a mall policy; No Cameras! If anybody was seen taking pictures, mall security would swoop down on them and prevent them. Nobody ever explained why this policy was in place, and at the time, (I was young and still learning how the world worked), I honestly didn't care. Furthermore, I got this weird thrill when I caught somebody and had the opportunity to call it in on the com-system like a three alarm fire. Everybody got a buzz off it. "But why?" "Mall policy! Are you making trouble?"
I'm not even sure if anybody knew the reasons for this weird law enforcement. All anybody knew was that recording images was bad, bad, bad.
Now, today I could probably think up a couple of reasons why this policy existed, but so what? It doesn't mean a damned thing. Lawyers and politicians have demonstrated time and again that it is entirely possible to come up with rational-sounding reasons for all manner of insane activities and thus get people to accept and go along with them. It happens all the time, and I'm sure everybody can think up an example or twenty.
The point I found curious is how eerily easy it is to jump whole-heartedly onto the enforcement bandwagon for no other reason than one happens to have been given a symbol of authority. A walkie-talkie, in this case.
Soldiers will open fire on un-armed demonstrators, their own neighbors, and they will continue to do so because humans are wired in a creepy way. The trick is recognizing this face and taking steps to navigate accordingly.
-FL
To make the page genuinely useful, a simple banner on the main page saying, "The 'X' Unix GUI" would have been enough. Then a "What Is X?" button might also be a good option. Hiding what you are under, "Base Technology" is about intuitive as a strait jacket in a clothing store.
And I notice I've been modded 'Troll'. All I said was the page was badly designed, my reasons for thinking so, and I asked what the hell X was. That's only a troll for people with low self-esteem. Jeez.
-FL
Is it a Unix Windows emulator?
Is it an abandoned Microsoft product?
What the hell is X?
-FL
Pass me a Blue and another piece of backbacon, eh. It's just us totally harmless Canadians up here.
-FL
Neoteny, (I don't understand the linguistics behind your term, but it's as good a label as any for 'appearing harmless and friendly'), combined with lethality when necessary is a great defense mechanism. --As one friend used to laugh when in the U.S. "Don't fuck with us, or we'll come and burn down your White House. Again."
Brute military in large numbers (the U.S. way) means exactly nothing when a small team of less than ten men with advanced hardware and ninja training (the Canadian way) can erase large armies as if they weren't there. Nobody talks about this. I am breaking code.
But then the U.S. doesn't care about effective militaries. It cares about controlling its population through enslaving all the people to military service and the war support industry. It's about social control through military structure rather than actually being able to kill your enemies effectively. (As we are seeing in Iraq. What a joke. --If anybody really wanted to take out the leadership in Baghdad, it could have been done quickly, quietly and nearly invisibly with very few casualties. It's been done before. --Big armies racing in and blowing everything up and then not being able to maintain control is unbelievably stupid. --Unless your goal is to create a giant quagmire through which to funnel lots of money and fuck up your country and stay in power. Hmm.)
I'd crow and say that Canada is one of the smartest and most dangerous countries on the face of the earth, but a bunch of beer drinking hockey players would kick my ass for talking.
Don't worry, though. We're all about survival and getting along happily with our friends all over the world. We don't have any interest in conquest. That's for schoolyard bullies, which we're not.
Even though it's still mostly based on a bunch of bullshit dogma and nationalistic rhetoric, and even though our government is run by the usual corrupt suspects, I'm actually quite proud to be Canadian. It'll be interesting to see if our groundwork is strong enough to withstand the black hole of the U.S. If our shit-head PM manages to get Canada to throw in with this missile defense bullshit, as well as the insane plan to bring both Canadian and U.S. armed forces under one command, I'll be seriously considering a move to France.
Fuck Anschluss!
-FL
They're pirates. Back-stabbing was the rule. But so, I believe, was the concept of 'fairly shared booty'. --What kind of retard pirate would set sail knowing they weren't going to get fairly compensated for risking their lives? (Well, other than U.S. soldiers who are not getting paid $1000 an hour like the corporate mercenaries doing the same job in the next oil-field over.) --Feed a bunch of 'civil society' bullshit to the kids, and you've got yourself an army of idiots willing to throw their lives away for 1 gold piece while the rest of us live off the fat. Ugly but true.
In other words, you're more than welcome to serve under me on my ship! Bring your friends, too! If they all think the way you do, then they'll grudgingly let me rip them off without raising a fuss, thinking that they are performing a noble act to prevent 'social anarchy' or some such nonsense.
This is why they teach kids dumb logic puzzles; to keep the salt mines peopled with chumps who do as they are told and actually think they are smart while doing so. And it's also why the elite have no trouble killing people off. They probably feel like I do right now; "If he's that daft, then he deserves to eat the NutraSweet!"
-FL
Another ultra-fluffy pirate world drawn in simple cartoon faces which is nonetheless broad and popular.
I can't figure out the life metaphor here. --Though, 'One Piece' (the manga series) was peopled with endless reams of charismatic sociopaths in search of treasure who were hard-wired to back-stab friends or stand up for comrades only when it could better their own lot. The whole thing traded on a very primitive understanding of morality.
Perhaps the metaphor here is as follows: The current world is a pretend artifice, (Happy faces and meaningless puzzle challenges), where pillage and poor ethics are rewarded, (Pirates), and where there is a larger world of politics which don't matter, because the whole reality is nothing more than a computer game where the real masters remain unseen, remain generally un-referred to, and whose entire purpose for providing and maintaining the game is to extract energy/money from the users populating the artificial environment.
Not a bad thing, necessarily, but an accurate picture of reality invitro.
-FL
I like the Monte Hall puzzle better, because it's less broken.
In real (pirate) life, if I was a low-ranking pirate in this logic game, I'd walk away with 25 gold and leave behind one dead senior pirate because I know how to make a side-deal which includes, "And after we kill the blighter, we stop messing around with this stupid voting nonsense. It's this way, or we all get screwed by so-called, 'logic'."
Game theory only works in controlled environments, (like computer simulations). In the real world of global politics, it only screws those who agree to play by the set rules, which is pretty damned stupid, considering where the rules come from. This is directly linked to such sayings as Tacitus' "The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws."
Long live Chaos!
-FL
A) When they were going to get sued either by id, or by the Aliens franchise holders.
B) When either id or the Aliens franchise holders would get around to ripping off and re-publishing the same game without giving royalties.
It might have been the friends I was with, or it might have been the vibe in the room at the time, but Spacehulk was easily one of the most entertaining board games I've ever played. And the fact that everybody could play co-operatively against a common alien threat put it right over the top with me. --I have a hard time enjoying games which pit friends against friends. I find such things make for unhappy energy in the room. The people I compete with in life are called "Enemies", and I do not eat pizza and watch movies with them.
-FL
That episode where they would arrest people based purely on matching personality records to crime profiles. I believe this only happened to people who had bad credit records. (Why punish consumers when there are non-contributing blanks taking up space in the Corporate machine?)
That show was visionary, and to think that it was a spin-off from a Coke-ad character. (Or am I remembering that incorrectly? It was twenty years ago, after all!)
-FL
As it is, I bet the auto company is grinding its teeth and swearing, "Curse you, Johns Hopkinses! We'd sue you if you weren't Johns Hopkinses. Nasty, little Johns Hopkinses!"
-FL
1. A wide support base filled with naive members given lots of good credos and compassionate spiritual laws to follow so that they seem altruistic and nourishing and all that good stuff while they spread their belief system.
2. When you get deeper into their literature, (and not even that much deeper), you discover that the higher end of the cult bases itself on the grafting of a 'Fulan', an energy being, onto one's own energy in return for 'special powers'. --Grafting an energy being into your own energy is fucking creepy, and I have never heard of any such case which is not parasitic in nature. It's just another energetic feeding arrangement designed to screw humans. It is all the more shocking in a place like China, where where everybody knows about energy and chi and doesn't dispute that reality. They know about demons and they know about energy vampirism. So what the hell? --A demon called by any other name is still a fucking demon. How dumb do you have to be to fall for basic re-wording and PR gloss?
And that's what it is. The Fulan Gong, like any cult worth its salt, has a very well orchestrated self-promotion and public relations arm. Like Israel, the Fulan Gong likes to make a very big deal about it's own persecution.
The fact of the matter is that there have been MANY spiritual groups which have been savaged by the government in China. --And many of them are far, far more legitimate than the Fulan Gong. I'm no fan of Facism, but the Fulan Gong is just another dangerous lie and it can go rot. I sympathize with the pains suffered by its ignorant followers; their stories really are tragic, but on the other hand. . . I really wish people would read and think for two minutes about the literature offered by a cult before joining it. Membership in any of the stupid religions to which most of this world belongs would be non-existent if people used their brains. Christianity, Judaism, Islam. . , they're all dumb and dangerous lies desgined to misdirect and bleed humans. --Witness the world today!
An interesting side-note. . . High level Scientologists are also into grafting energy beings directly onto its followers, but they're savy enough to conceal that fact and base their whole bullshit cult on secrets; you don't know what the heck you've really joined until you've been a (paying) member for fifteen years! Any spiritual group which as a policy keeps secrets from people making inquiries out of genuine interest should automatically be avoided.
Ignorance endangers. Knowledge protects.
-FL
Who the heck cares?
Every time you pick a mate, you're messing with DNA.
Well, actually. . , the problem is that the control belongs to soulless corps. How long until they start breeding dumber humans with a gene which makes people reflexively want to Buy Useless Crap. Or react poorly to non-GM foods. Or work smarter with fewer complaints. Oh, the list is endless in a lame sci-fi kind of way.
The comforting thing is that they never paid much attention to anything but the most trivial 'augmented soldier' nonsense on Star Trek, which leads me to think that it's probably not much of a problem we'll be needing to make any choices about in our current reality. There's not really enough time left to worry about this kind of thing. --The damage was done back when humans were first written. (Clever adjustments were made, such as linking sexual pleasure to violence, and activating the capacity for a strong sense of jealousy. Among other things.)
-FL