Revenue Canada reps last summer also attended a world government conference to deal with the growing 'problem' of lost tax revenues due to internet sales. The bureaucrats were quite literally getting hysterical with the fear that money was moving without being bled off to pay for their comfy suburban houses and four door family cars, big screen televisions and private school bills.
In Canada, at any rate, the party is ending, the vultures are landing.
I'm always amazed that people only re-install the gallows when it's far, far too late.
I have known personally many government bureacrats and civil servants. They were ALL either grown in nerd-tanks and fed to bursing with feel-no-guilt dogma, or they were genuinely smart people who have given up trying to act in a moral fashion. They can all fucking hang, I say.
Mob rules.
(So how long until the white vans come to visit my house, do you think?)
One of the prime excuses for the existence of the American military is to take gobs and gobs of tax payer's money and give it to industrial giants who have friends within the government, via the Carlyle Group model of redistribution of wealth and conflict of interest. (Which nobody has yet been arrested, tried or convicted for, and probably never will.)
I wonder what the political ties are to SCO. Has anybody looked into that? Are there any ex-CIA guys at the top of that power structure?
And what with Bill Gates working with the vaunted offices of Homeland Security, it seems that the noose is really tightening on public information technologies. --The most promising area of total control of the human race.
When the government can watch your every action through sneaky software which you can't do anything about because Open Source no longer exists, and when the government can turn off your debit/credit cards at will whenever it deems your actions as seditious. . . Well, starvation is a wonderful motivator, isn't it? Ah. The cashless society. (What with all of that evil counterfeiting which has become a national pass-time to worry about, --to such a degree that the growing public distrust of money is almost invisible at this point. How many hundreds of millions of ultraviolet money-lamps have been installed next to cash registers over the last ten years. . ?)
Not that I'm complaining, comrade. Wouldn't dream of it! Got to get those damned terrorists, after all. And isn't it fantastic how the price of chocolate has gone down again? That's the government looking out for us, old boy!
There are some good messages which do make it through the medium. I like pre-recorded movies because it nixes the chance of being sucked into ads and the whole, "Well, TNG starts in fifteen minutes, so I'll just watch 'Friends' until then, so no harm done, right?" thinking.
I agree; good sci-fi is often an excellent medium for positive messages.
I think there's a special slot for me. I think it was called, "Lazy, bitter smartass," or something similar. Early mornings don't fit well on me, it seems!
Don't know exactly what to make of this, but thought it was worth sharing. I know exactly zero about this source, but from what I have heard from within the shadows of the secret military, I have no doubt that such things are possible.
Interesting reading, nonetheless.
-FL
Horrifying US Secret Weapon Unleashed In Baghdad Exclusive By Bill Dash c. 2003 All Rights Reserved 8-25-03
A nightmarish US super weapon reportedly was employed by American ground forces during chaotic street fighting in Baghdad. The secret tank-mounted weapon was witnessed in all its frightening power by Majid al-Ghazali, a seasoned Iraqi infantryman who described the device and its gruesome effects as unlike anything he had ever encountered in his lengthy military service. The disturbing revelation is yet another piece of cinematic evidence brought back from postwar Iraq by intrepid filmmaker Patrick Dillon.
In the film, al-Ghazali, whose english is less than fluent, describes the weapon as reminiscent of a flame thrower, only immensely more powerful. It is unclear what principle the weapon is based on. Searching for a description, al-Ghazali said it appeared to be shooting concentrated lightning bolts rather than just ordinary flames. Drawing on his many years as a professional engineer, al-Ghazali speculates that radiation of some kind probably figures into the weapon's hideous capabilities. Like all men in Saddam's Iraq, al-Ghazali was compelled to serve in the Iraqi equivalent of the Army National Guard and fought in three wars over the past thirty-odd years. Via email, he told me he has seen virtually every type of conventional weapon employed in battle, and is well acquainted with their effects on people and machines, but nothing in his extensive combat experience prepared him for the shock of what he saw in Baghdad on April 12th.
On that date, al-Ghazali and his family sheltered in their house as a fierce street battle erupted in his neighborhood. In the midst of the fighting, he noticed that the Americans had called up an oddly configured tank. Then to his amazement the tank suddenly let loose a blinding stream of what seemed like fire and lightning, engulfing a large passenger bus and three automobiles. Within seconds the bus had become semi-molten, sagging "like a wet rag" as he put it. He said the bus rapidly melted under this withering blast, shrinking until it was a twisted blob about the dimensions of a VW bug. As if that were not bizarre enough, al-Ghazali explicitly describes seeing numerous human bodies shriveled to the size of newborn babies. By the time local street fighting ended that day, he estimates between 500 and 600 soldiers and civilians had been cooked alive as a result of the mysterious tank-mounted device.
In a city littered everywhere with burned-out civilian and military vehicles, US forces were abnormally scrupulous about immediately detailing bulldozers and shovel crews to the job of burying the grim wreckage. Nevertheless, telltale remnants remained as Dillon found when al-Ghazali later took him to the site. Dillon said they easily uncovered large puddles of resolidified metal and mounds of weird fibrous material that, al-Ghazali explained, were all that remained of the vehicles' tires. Dillon, who accumulated plenty of battlefield experience as a medic in Viet-Nam, and has since covered a number of wars from Somalia to Kosovo, told me that he has witnessed every kind of conventional ordnance that can be used on humans and vehicles. " I've seen a freaking smorgasbord of destruction in my life," he said, "flame-throwers, napalm, white phosphorous, thermite, you name it. I know of nothing short of an H-bomb that conceivably might cause a bus to instantly liquefy or that can flash broil a human body down to the size of an infant. God pity humanity if that thing is a preview of what's in store for the 21st century."
For Majid al-Ghazali, images of the terrifying weapon and its victims haunt his every day. In addition to his w
And it's been 2 years and 8 months since I last played a brain-sucking video game or watched a television.
Things just keep on getting better since I took back my time! My head is much more clear. I read more and my thinking is sharper than ever before. I have a girlfriend now, my skin has cleared up, and I'm doing much better at work. I feel healthier and stronger than I have in years. I am engaged in more active, outdoor pursuits, and I've taken up the guitar. The amazing part is that I didn't set out to do any of these things; they all just came to me naturally as my free time opened up and my mind sought alternative outlets so that I wouldn't be bored. It's like how it was when I was a child and there were no video games. I couldn't have done any of this without such a supportive group to help me through the hard times. Thank you!
If only I could have back all those thousands and thousands of wasted hours. ..
20% Stupid jokes 10% "But you still need pressure!" redundant observation. 30% "Electrostatics? Please. I'm too cool to be impressed." 20% "I TOTALLY don't get it, and will prove as much by saying something asinine." 18% Skeptical combination of the above. 2% Genuinely insightful observation.
It just goes to show; smart Slashdotters sleep in.
I can't quite tell how ironic Michael is being here, but it's an interesting post regardless of how one takes it.
A lot of people have responded with, "Have you seen The Science Channel?" and "Hey, there's Discovery". Somebody else even claimed that the Canadian version of "Discovery" is superior to the U.S. version, which I would only agree with in that perhaps Canadians are better educated in general and thus need a smarter form of dis-info in order to be properly bullshitted, and Jay Ingram are so very full of shit.
Here's the sad, ugly truth of the matter: Television is a tool of mind-control through societal behavior modification. It is incredibly effective in many basic ways. It is owned up and down by the kind of people and organizations who are aligned and well suited to this kind of work.
You will NEVER get a generally available 'Science' television show which is un-biased, un-manipulative, and which honestly seeks to enlighten its viewers. NEVER. --Science in its current, publically accepted form, is founded upon a series of lies to begin with. There is simply no way the basic nature of television will change short of a massive paradigm shift where all the people in positions of power suddenly turn 'good'. This seems unlikely.
With the exception of DVD's and such, I stopped watching television about a year ago. That is, I do not watch any of the 'live' commercial feed into which virtually everybody in the West is plugged. The results were fascinating, if not un-predictable. ..
1. There was a period of withdraw pain, and a desire to watch television. This lasted for several months.
2. Then, the strangest thing happened. Not only did the desire to watch television dry up and vanish, but I discovered that I now feel extremely ill at ease when I am visiting another person's house where they have a television playing. The hammering of advertising especially feels the most horrible and numbing. It's literally a job not to want to escape the room. My natural tolerance has vanished, and I feel amazed that other people can stand to be around a television. It's stunning. Like an ex-smoker being now repulsed by smoke. Very similar.
3. Amazingly, all the extra time I thought I would be bored during, twiddling my thumbs, (and the first few months were like that), has now been easily absorbed by the rest of my day. I get SO much more stuff done now! Life has in a very real sense, been enriched.
4. I once thought it was important to be tuned in to television so that I could share the common experience of everybody else in the West; to stay in touch with humanity. One of my biggest revelations is that, as it turns out, I now strongly recognize that I don't want to be part of that mass awareness. Quite simply, the collective 'awareness' of the television watching public is extraordinarily restrcited, dumb and numb. I feel like I am awake now, properly, for the first time in years, and I am disgusted to think that I was ever one of the sleepers sitting, staring into that queer, flickering light.
What a science fiction idea! That a whole population subjects itself for hours to that creepy flickering light. Watching people watch television is fucking disturbing, and we all know it. It's like those Borg ports where the head is plugged into that flickering thing. Fucked up, and everybody knows it.
What I find most upsetting is when I see little children innocently watching television without their parents warning them of what is being done to their developing minds. There is so little chance for people to escape, as the conditioning begins almost from birth. Only one in a thousand or so seem to manage to break away. Maybe even fewer.
They're probably going to be pirate disks, and the subtitling was done poorly. (Pirates can't be expected to have 'good english', I suppose.)
There are a handful of other films, the titles of which I cannot pronunce.
One is about a woman in her late twenties who taks the summer off to work on an organic saffron flower farm, where she falls in love. Another is a forty minute movie about a highschool boy, also falling in love, (with one of those pretty girls who trouble seems to gravitate to.) Another is a long and quite brilliant series about a bunch of magical racoon-type creatures who are trying to save their woodland habitat from urban crawl. I don't know what Miyazaki's involvement on these projects was, and they have a somewhat more experimental feel to them, but they are all gems, and the animation in the animal one is miles ahead of most anime.
Also look for the half dozen 'Sherlock Hound' and the three 'Lupin IIIrd' episodes Miyazaki directed. All of them are thoroughly amazing.
Nonsense. They wont kill us, they'll just mess with our cognitive functions and significantly alter our brain chemistry. (Look at the pretty pictures of brain slices.)
But don't feel bad. It's the same one the Air Force was selling to its soldiers who worked the early radar arrays, and its the first line of defense which was adopted and which has been used ever since by big business and the government. The argument being, "If the power is too low to cause damage through heating, then there is no danger."
If only this were true!
There is a mountain of science which has recognized the following. ..
1. Biological nervous systems are electrochemical in nature. This is why EEG scanners work; they are able to pick up on EM activity generated by the brain. In all systems where electromagnetic signals are integral, foriegn signals can have an impact.
2. There are documented mechanisms [geocities.com] through which low power, non-ionizing EM fields can affect the function of the nervous system.
3. Very small currents are all that are needed to causes these effects.
4. High frequency signals which are modulated to replicate lower frequencies, (As seen in Cell phone technology), are sufficient to cause effects.
5. The ocean of EM we live in DOES have an effect. Sleep, reproductive and various other biological cycles have been shown to be deeply affected, and often reliant upon ambient EM from the Earth and sky.
Here's an article [protectingourhealth.org] with some photos of slices of brain tissue taken from rats exposed to cell phone EM. The effects are real.
You pick up, and telemarketer babbles on at you for a while. Before they get to their yes/no question, you interrupt with:
"Hold on! Back up. --What was that last part? I missed that."
When Telemarketer repeats, immediately interrupt again.
"No, no, no. Before that. Where are you calling from?"
Telemarketer pauses, tells you.
Immediately ask another inane question to keep them off balance. I like to use: "No kidding? Where is that? Do you actually work there, or are you calling from somewhere else?" (That's two questions; now the telemarketer has to really stop and think.) This is all it takes to turn the game around. The conversation is now progressing according to your timetable and agenda. Don't give them time to plug back in to their script.
From this point on, you can do whatever you want. You can kill the conversation altogether, or as I do when I'm feeling annoyed and anti-productive, is I'll start asking personal details, and question into their choice of job, or the validity of the product they are selling. If a charitable organization, tell them, "Wow, I thought I had respect for you guys; I had no idea you'd started doing telemarketing. This changes everything! I consider telemarketing morally repugnant. So, actaully, perhaps you can help me; I'd like to cancel the $30-per month automatic credit card donations I make to your organization. Can you do that from your desk?" (They can't.) If you are not making regular donations, pretend you are and sound really distressed and ignore their reasons when they refuse to cancel. "What kind of organization is this?" Make them dig up a phone number and contact name so that you can cancel your regular donations. This will scare them, because it's their job to make money, not give it up. After you've ruined the day for several layers of command structure, they might start to re-think telemarketing as a means of fund raising. It's your obligation to make this process as miserable as possible so as to keep your charity of choice on the level! Oh, and you can gurantee that your number will be crossed off a lot of lists after a few episodes like this one.
But when it comes right down to it, I've found that the following is the fastest way to terminate any of these calls:
Exuberently interrupt them and say, "Wow, that's great. But you know what? I am completely uninterested in what you're asking/selling. Sorry. But Take Care, and thanks for calling!"
(Click).
Always thank them. Always be civil and always try to enjoy the conversation in a happy way. This undermines the true purpose of telemarketing which, of course, is to pervert society by making people less tolerant of their fellow humans by making everybody more likely to feel mean and angry.
a critical mass of people start doing/using/being the same thing, then larger, (usually corporate), interests invariably swing the greedlamp of their attention over to that new thing. They determine what people most want from it, make that part into a carrot, and generally restrict access to the truly valuable elements so that everybody ends up with a half-assed, highly polished product which bleeds them in some way. -Either financially, through frustration, through limitation, through mis-information, through addiction, and by generally, (and most insidiously), by dumbing them down so that they no only don't realize it, but even defend it.
When everybody on the planet with a computer and a phone line started using Google, it became only a matter of time before it turned into something slick, restrictive and deliberately manipulative.
The matrix is about control - and making people ashamed of their biological origins is a fundamental way to control them.
True. But I don't see how the scene helped to counter this effect, except in that it was psychologically, (for the audience), linked to the approval and encouragement of a respected figure, (Morpheus).
That on it's own made it powerful. But I'm still not certain I trust the film's creators. There were weak scenes, unclear and conflicting messages this time around. The first film, while it had some rogue messages in it, had a strong signal to noise ratio. This second confused me in many ways. Which is why I question the 'orgy' scene.
It seemed deliberately over-stated. The scene didn't attempt to include the audience, rather it appeared deliberately horrific. Somebody has already likened it to the opening vampire-dance-club scene from Blade. I'm not certain what the intent was behind it; to force people to look objective reality in the face? That on its own is a worthy goal, but I have trouble imagining that it was on purpose.
I'll certainly be watching that film again when it comes out on DVD to see if I can't figure out what the hell was going on.
Zion? With their doors all painted red? Now that's rich, these days, with Zionism showing its true colors. Makes me wonder. . . Just how clear are the Waters of Truth from which the Wachowski brothers have been drinking?
I used them all the time, but then they stopped distributing them in North America! I was forced back to the old grey uniball series, which aren't nearly as nice. Pity.
What sucks is that I thought they'd just stopped making them. Knowing that they exist in another country for chump-change, is. . . Annoying.
Your beliefs don't matter in this case. Of Electricity or Chi, 'Chi' is the one which both makes sense, and which is the current commodity in the real world.
The reason Electricity was used is that people in Western culture have been so successfully programmed to reject the concept of Energy, (a fairly spectacular con job, all in all, thus locking much of the world into the feeding cycle with almost zero hope of escape). The result? A ridiculous contrivance for an otherwise cool film.
What is this talk about SOHO? What nefarious activity are you implying?
Last year, when there was a particularly large object showing up on the public internet SOHO data streem, NASA pulled that old movie trick, of killing the live feed, and running in its place an old feed from a month or so earlier, but with falsified date stamps.
Nit-picky astronomy geeks, being what geeks are, caught it.
This was the worst of the offenses. Typically, these days, when comet activity is particularly hot, NASA just kills the feed altogether and blames it on technical difficulty.
Do some Googling. This story and the images in question should still be available.
something tells me that gravitational wobble should be evident within our solar system if an object with a mass and gravitational pull the size of a brown dwarf were that nearby. Such a wobble, like the wobble produced by our moon on earth, should cause the position of celestial bodies in the sky to shift position from year to year, however that doesn't seem to happen (or at least, not to my non-astronomical knowledge).
Well, the point of the whole theory is that there is unaccounted for wobble, and the reason the Nemesis and similar theories were proposed were in efforts to explain this phenomenon.
Now, I admit that I found Plato virtually unreadable, (I would have been among those eager to hang Socrates for being an irritating asshole), and thus never bothered to dig terribly deeply into the Big Greek's work.
However, I would have seen the cave allegory, (if anything) as a parallel for the entire Matrix concept; (to paraphrase, "If all one has ever experienced are shadows cast against a cave wall, then being exposed to the outdoors would be mind-blowing.") But I cannot, however, see how the 'Orgy in the Cave' scene had anything to do the Cave Allegory. Unless one is willing to do some fairly stretchy mental gymnastics.
Why the orgy scene? It was pretty repulsive. Didn't make me feel any real sympathy for humanity.
I'd have to watch the thing again to be certain, but my first and last impression was that, unlike the first film, the second was a garbled mess with no message to speak of.
I never liked the "machines are using humans as energy cells" aspect of the plot. There are far better sources of energy the machines could have used, such as nuclear, geothermal, etc. I always thought wouldn't it have been cooler if the machines were imprisoning humans and using their brains in a sort of massive computing grid? That the machines needed our collective brainpower for some task, and the purpose of the Matrix is to keep all of those human brains humming along and doing their machine-appointed task in the backround.
I felt very much the same way until I realized that the metaphor they were using was just that; a metaphor.
What if, rather than electrical energy, the occupying force needed something which could only be harvested from humans? Soul energy. I think the Wachowski brothers were either extremely clued in, or they were being cleverly manipulated to produce the message they did!
Ghost in the Shell confused me. I couldn't figure out what its point was, and I'm willing to bet even Shirow couldn't tell me.
While very pretty, it seemed to be just another example of Shirow's broken abilities as a story teller. Like Appleseed, Ghost held some real promise, but it sort of floated away while trying to pretend that it held some kind of deep message which it didn't. Shirow is an adept world-builder, but he has a hard time making an audience care about his characters.
I guess that's what happens when you decide instead to focus your skills on porn; on surface gloss rather than exploring the inner depths of a character's soul.
We've scanned the sky in X-Ray, infrared, radio, and gamma ray, and haven't found ANYTHING resembling another planet or nearby star. Planets, especially gas giants, tend to be noisy and easily visible by radio, and ALL planetary bodies have some kind of infrared signature. If there were anything out there of any appreciable size, we'd have seen some sign of it by now.
Interesting!
I don't know quite enough about astronomy to properly suggest anything with authority. I would, however, be cautious before walking away based on even very good armchair logic.
For instance, the astronomers who discovered odd behavior in Kuiper Belt objects and who suggested that perhaps a large object might be responsible were not examining and publishing 25 years ago, but rather only a very few years ago. Those looking at the problem didn't strike me as being conspiracy twits, and the various orthodox science-oriented media outlets seemed to take them seriously. --Which while, of course, prooves nothing in and of itself, does lead me to think that such researchers might have recognized your point through the course of their studies but chose to continue regardless.
Further, I also suspect that such an object, were it to exist, may very well have been detected. There's no reason, though, why the public would have been informed. NASA's silly behavior with SOHO is certainly evidence enough of their willingness to hide data when it applies to issues of comets!
Also, keep in mind, that were such an object to pop up in a more public scanning of the heavens, I don't think it would jump out quite so instantly. Though large, it would still be little more than a tiny dot among millions of other tiny, noisy dots. And once located, would have to be confirmed and understood for what it was. This is long an arduous work, particularly when one is not looking in the immediate neighborhood. We're still finding new moons around the big planets, and these are objects which are within the range of visible light. I would be very cautious before boldly announcing that we know all there is to know about our solar system!
You are, I think, speaking of the Nemesis Theory which is just that - a theory, yet to be proven.
Actually, IIRC there's been some recent evidence that casts serious doubts on the validity of the theory [. ..]
Well, the 'serious doubts' I've seen cast have all had the ear mark of the desperate. But you're right. The Nemesis Theory and similar have not been officially proven, nor will they be, (the halls of officialdom being what they are). The point of the matter, though, is that people have known this was coming for quite some time now, have known it was not the sort of thing which one can Nuke away with a Bruce Willis, and they have been devising other methods of dealing with the expected aftermath. "Althernative 3" fantasies are actually based on something.
In any case. . . --I find the media activity over the last few years very interesting. And the proof, as always, will be in the pudding.
We'll just watch and see. With any luck, this is merely a blip on the radar and I'm just shadow chasing. But I wouldn't bet on it.
Slashdot Mirror
Revenue Canada reps last summer also attended a world government conference to deal with the growing 'problem' of lost tax revenues due to internet sales. The bureaucrats were quite literally getting hysterical with the fear that money was moving without being bled off to pay for their comfy suburban houses and four door family cars, big screen televisions and private school bills.
In Canada, at any rate, the party is ending, the vultures are landing.
I'm always amazed that people only re-install the gallows when it's far, far too late.
I have known personally many government bureacrats and civil servants. They were ALL either grown in nerd-tanks and fed to bursing with feel-no-guilt dogma, or they were genuinely smart people who have given up trying to act in a moral fashion. They can all fucking hang, I say.
Mob rules.
(So how long until the white vans come to visit my house, do you think?)
-FL
I wonder what the political ties are to SCO. Has anybody looked into that? Are there any ex-CIA guys at the top of that power structure?
And what with Bill Gates working with the vaunted offices of Homeland Security, it seems that the noose is really tightening on public information technologies. --The most promising area of total control of the human race.
When the government can watch your every action through sneaky software which you can't do anything about because Open Source no longer exists, and when the government can turn off your debit/credit cards at will whenever it deems your actions as seditious. . . Well, starvation is a wonderful motivator, isn't it? Ah. The cashless society. (What with all of that evil counterfeiting which has become a national pass-time to worry about, --to such a degree that the growing public distrust of money is almost invisible at this point. How many hundreds of millions of ultraviolet money-lamps have been installed next to cash registers over the last ten years. . ?)
Not that I'm complaining, comrade. Wouldn't dream of it! Got to get those damned terrorists, after all. And isn't it fantastic how the price of chocolate has gone down again? That's the government looking out for us, old boy!
Heil Schwarzenegger!
-FL
I agree; good sci-fi is often an excellent medium for positive messages.
-FL
-FL
Interesting reading, nonetheless.
-FL
Things just keep on getting better since I took back my time! My head is much more clear. I read more and my thinking is sharper than ever before. I have a girlfriend now, my skin has cleared up, and I'm doing much better at work. I feel healthier and stronger than I have in years. I am engaged in more active, outdoor pursuits, and I've taken up the guitar. The amazing part is that I didn't set out to do any of these things; they all just came to me naturally as my free time opened up and my mind sought alternative outlets so that I wouldn't be bored. It's like how it was when I was a child and there were no video games. I couldn't have done any of this without such a supportive group to help me through the hard times. Thank you!
If only I could have back all those thousands and thousands of wasted hours. .
-FL
20% Stupid jokes
10% "But you still need pressure!" redundant observation.
30% "Electrostatics? Please. I'm too cool to be impressed."
20% "I TOTALLY don't get it, and will prove as much by saying something asinine."
18% Skeptical combination of the above.
2% Genuinely insightful observation.
It just goes to show; smart Slashdotters sleep in.
-FL
A lot of people have responded with, "Have you seen The Science Channel?" and "Hey, there's Discovery". Somebody else even claimed that the Canadian version of "Discovery" is superior to the U.S. version, which I would only agree with in that perhaps Canadians are better educated in general and thus need a smarter form of dis-info in order to be properly bullshitted, and Jay Ingram are so very full of shit.
Here's the sad, ugly truth of the matter: Television is a tool of mind-control through societal behavior modification. It is incredibly effective in many basic ways. It is owned up and down by the kind of people and organizations who are aligned and well suited to this kind of work.
You will NEVER get a generally available 'Science' television show which is un-biased, un-manipulative, and which honestly seeks to enlighten its viewers. NEVER. --Science in its current, publically accepted form, is founded upon a series of lies to begin with. There is simply no way the basic nature of television will change short of a massive paradigm shift where all the people in positions of power suddenly turn 'good'. This seems unlikely.
With the exception of DVD's and such, I stopped watching television about a year ago. That is, I do not watch any of the 'live' commercial feed into which virtually everybody in the West is plugged. The results were fascinating, if not un-predictable. .
What a science fiction idea! That a whole population subjects itself for hours to that creepy flickering light. Watching people watch television is fucking disturbing, and we all know it. It's like those Borg ports where the head is plugged into that flickering thing. Fucked up, and everybody knows it.
What I find most upsetting is when I see little children innocently watching television without their parents warning them of what is being done to their developing minds. There is so little chance for people to escape, as the conditioning begins almost from birth. Only one in a thousand or so seem to manage to break away. Maybe even fewer.
-FL
There are a handful of other films, the titles of which I cannot pronunce.
One is about a woman in her late twenties who taks the summer off to work on an organic saffron flower farm, where she falls in love. Another is a forty minute movie about a highschool boy, also falling in love, (with one of those pretty girls who trouble seems to gravitate to.) Another is a long and quite brilliant series about a bunch of magical racoon-type creatures who are trying to save their woodland habitat from urban crawl. I don't know what Miyazaki's involvement on these projects was, and they have a somewhat more experimental feel to them, but they are all gems, and the animation in the animal one is miles ahead of most anime.
Also look for the half dozen 'Sherlock Hound' and the three 'Lupin IIIrd' episodes Miyazaki directed. All of them are thoroughly amazing.
Happy hunting!
-FL
Nonsense. They wont kill us, they'll just mess with our cognitive functions and significantly alter our brain chemistry. (Look at the pretty pictures of brain slices.)
-FL
-FL
If only this were true!
There is a mountain of science which has recognized the following. .
Here's an article [protectingourhealth.org] with some photos of slices of brain tissue taken from rats exposed to cell phone EM. The effects are real.
-FL
"Hold on! Back up. --What was that last part? I missed that."
When Telemarketer repeats, immediately interrupt again.
"No, no, no. Before that. Where are you calling from?"
Telemarketer pauses, tells you.
Immediately ask another inane question to keep them off balance. I like to use: "No kidding? Where is that? Do you actually work there, or are you calling from somewhere else?" (That's two questions; now the telemarketer has to really stop and think.) This is all it takes to turn the game around. The conversation is now progressing according to your timetable and agenda. Don't give them time to plug back in to their script.
From this point on, you can do whatever you want. You can kill the conversation altogether, or as I do when I'm feeling annoyed and anti-productive, is I'll start asking personal details, and question into their choice of job, or the validity of the product they are selling. If a charitable organization, tell them, "Wow, I thought I had respect for you guys; I had no idea you'd started doing telemarketing. This changes everything! I consider telemarketing morally repugnant. So, actaully, perhaps you can help me; I'd like to cancel the $30-per month automatic credit card donations I make to your organization. Can you do that from your desk?" (They can't.) If you are not making regular donations, pretend you are and sound really distressed and ignore their reasons when they refuse to cancel. "What kind of organization is this?" Make them dig up a phone number and contact name so that you can cancel your regular donations. This will scare them, because it's their job to make money, not give it up. After you've ruined the day for several layers of command structure, they might start to re-think telemarketing as a means of fund raising. It's your obligation to make this process as miserable as possible so as to keep your charity of choice on the level! Oh, and you can gurantee that your number will be crossed off a lot of lists after a few episodes like this one.
But when it comes right down to it, I've found that the following is the fastest way to terminate any of these calls:
Exuberently interrupt them and say, "Wow, that's great. But you know what? I am completely uninterested in what you're asking/selling. Sorry. But Take Care, and thanks for calling!"
(Click).
Always thank them. Always be civil and always try to enjoy the conversation in a happy way. This undermines the true purpose of telemarketing which, of course, is to pervert society by making people less tolerant of their fellow humans by making everybody more likely to feel mean and angry.
-FL
When everybody on the planet with a computer and a phone line started using Google, it became only a matter of time before it turned into something slick, restrictive and deliberately manipulative.
-FL
True. But I don't see how the scene helped to counter this effect, except in that it was psychologically, (for the audience), linked to the approval and encouragement of a respected figure, (Morpheus).
That on it's own made it powerful. But I'm still not certain I trust the film's creators. There were weak scenes, unclear and conflicting messages this time around. The first film, while it had some rogue messages in it, had a strong signal to noise ratio. This second confused me in many ways. Which is why I question the 'orgy' scene.
It seemed deliberately over-stated. The scene didn't attempt to include the audience, rather it appeared deliberately horrific. Somebody has already likened it to the opening vampire-dance-club scene from Blade. I'm not certain what the intent was behind it; to force people to look objective reality in the face? That on its own is a worthy goal, but I have trouble imagining that it was on purpose.
I'll certainly be watching that film again when it comes out on DVD to see if I can't figure out what the hell was going on.
Zion? With their doors all painted red? Now that's rich, these days, with Zionism showing its true colors. Makes me wonder. . . Just how clear are the Waters of Truth from which the Wachowski brothers have been drinking?
-FL
What sucks is that I thought they'd just stopped making them. Knowing that they exist in another country for chump-change, is. . . Annoying.
-FL
Your beliefs don't matter in this case. Of Electricity or Chi, 'Chi' is the one which both makes sense, and which is the current commodity in the real world.
The reason Electricity was used is that people in Western culture have been so successfully programmed to reject the concept of Energy, (a fairly spectacular con job, all in all, thus locking much of the world into the feeding cycle with almost zero hope of escape). The result? A ridiculous contrivance for an otherwise cool film.
-FL
Last year, when there was a particularly large object showing up on the public internet SOHO data streem, NASA pulled that old movie trick, of killing the live feed, and running in its place an old feed from a month or so earlier, but with falsified date stamps.
Nit-picky astronomy geeks, being what geeks are, caught it.
This was the worst of the offenses. Typically, these days, when comet activity is particularly hot, NASA just kills the feed altogether and blames it on technical difficulty.
Do some Googling. This story and the images in question should still be available.
-FL
Well, the point of the whole theory is that there is unaccounted for wobble, and the reason the Nemesis and similar theories were proposed were in efforts to explain this phenomenon.
-FL
No kidding?
Now, I admit that I found Plato virtually unreadable, (I would have been among those eager to hang Socrates for being an irritating asshole), and thus never bothered to dig terribly deeply into the Big Greek's work.
However, I would have seen the cave allegory, (if anything) as a parallel for the entire Matrix concept; (to paraphrase, "If all one has ever experienced are shadows cast against a cave wall, then being exposed to the outdoors would be mind-blowing.") But I cannot, however, see how the 'Orgy in the Cave' scene had anything to do the Cave Allegory. Unless one is willing to do some fairly stretchy mental gymnastics.
Care to explain?
-FL
I'd have to watch the thing again to be certain, but my first and last impression was that, unlike the first film, the second was a garbled mess with no message to speak of.
-FL
I felt very much the same way until I realized that the metaphor they were using was just that; a metaphor.
What if, rather than electrical energy, the occupying force needed something which could only be harvested from humans? Soul energy. I think the Wachowski brothers were either extremely clued in, or they were being cleverly manipulated to produce the message they did!
-FL
While very pretty, it seemed to be just another example of Shirow's broken abilities as a story teller. Like Appleseed, Ghost held some real promise, but it sort of floated away while trying to pretend that it held some kind of deep message which it didn't. Shirow is an adept world-builder, but he has a hard time making an audience care about his characters.
I guess that's what happens when you decide instead to focus your skills on porn; on surface gloss rather than exploring the inner depths of a character's soul.
-FL
Interesting!
I don't know quite enough about astronomy to properly suggest anything with authority. I would, however, be cautious before walking away based on even very good armchair logic.
For instance, the astronomers who discovered odd behavior in Kuiper Belt objects and who suggested that perhaps a large object might be responsible were not examining and publishing 25 years ago, but rather only a very few years ago. Those looking at the problem didn't strike me as being conspiracy twits, and the various orthodox science-oriented media outlets seemed to take them seriously. --Which while, of course, prooves nothing in and of itself, does lead me to think that such researchers might have recognized your point through the course of their studies but chose to continue regardless.
Further, I also suspect that such an object, were it to exist, may very well have been detected. There's no reason, though, why the public would have been informed. NASA's silly behavior with SOHO is certainly evidence enough of their willingness to hide data when it applies to issues of comets!
Also, keep in mind, that were such an object to pop up in a more public scanning of the heavens, I don't think it would jump out quite so instantly. Though large, it would still be little more than a tiny dot among millions of other tiny, noisy dots. And once located, would have to be confirmed and understood for what it was. This is long an arduous work, particularly when one is not looking in the immediate neighborhood. We're still finding new moons around the big planets, and these are objects which are within the range of visible light. I would be very cautious before boldly announcing that we know all there is to know about our solar system!
Still, it is an interesting point you raise!
-FL
Actually, IIRC there's been some recent evidence that casts serious doubts on the validity of the theory [. .
Well, the 'serious doubts' I've seen cast have all had the ear mark of the desperate. But you're right. The Nemesis Theory and similar have not been officially proven, nor will they be, (the halls of officialdom being what they are). The point of the matter, though, is that people have known this was coming for quite some time now, have known it was not the sort of thing which one can Nuke away with a Bruce Willis, and they have been devising other methods of dealing with the expected aftermath. "Althernative 3" fantasies are actually based on something.
In any case. . . --I find the media activity over the last few years very interesting. And the proof, as always, will be in the pudding.
We'll just watch and see. With any luck, this is merely a blip on the radar and I'm just shadow chasing. But I wouldn't bet on it.
-FL