Continental Europe is eventually going to rise up and hammer an over-extended U.S. into bloody pulp. --France certainly had the balls to tell the U.S. to fuck off when it counted. That's FAR more than one can say about the average American citizen who, for all their gun-toting bravado, allowed a coke-head criminal to steal away their precious democratic government without a single shot being fired.
And if you knew your history, (which you probably don't), then you'd know that Athens, against all odds, defeated power hungry Atlantis waaaay back during the last incarnation of all these end of the world theatrics.
Think I'm nuts? If you manage to survive the next seven years or so in America, (which, is going to be tougher than you think!), then you'll get to watch it all unfold for yourself. Enjoy.
I've noticed in the last few months that Slashdot's science coverage is going downhill. Good things go unmentioned, while crap like 'metaphysical' materials gets posted. Better refresh. Probably got a new story up about free energy or time travel. Or maybe one about creationism being correct, while we're at it.
And I've noticed that posters with login ID numbers which are over 500,000 are prone to sounding like commercially fabricated idiots who still believe what their high school text books told them.
This is, of course, not true of all such posters! But it certainly seems to apply this guy. Why is that? Is it a product of youthful naivite? Or is it simply that all the dis-info artists were caught off guard when they realized that Slashdot was becoming a forum of both influence and actual thought among the all-powerful geek sector which controls the well being of American technology?
Anime and manga all look very very similar if all you've seen are similar-looking anime and manga.
There's plenty of unique-looking manga out there.
Plenty? Not quite. There is some. Miyazaki, is an excellent example. Nothing looks at all like Nausicaa. He defies several chipped-in-stone Manga conventions simply by drawing everything free-hand, including panal borders! But I certainly wouldn't characterize Miyazaki as a typical manga artist, and neither do I call his work Anime. There is nothing pop-art or fan-boy about anything Miyazaki creates. He exists within his own category.
Mind you, I am talking in generalizations when I say that most Manga is very similar looking, but when it comes to Anime and Manga, I think those generalizations are more than justified!
I also want to add that I don't have anything against Manga and Anime. When you first discover it, it's all a mountain of fun! As I always say, formulas work for a reason. I just happened to get my fill of it ten years ago. Once you begin to comprehend that there are indeed formulas and hack-artists and all that, then you are ready to graduate to more complicated forms of expression within the same medium. --And that doesn't mean one can't also sit down and enjoy an episode of 'Bebop' or what have you. (I haven't tried, but I am assured my time would not be wasted.) Even an old and tired formula can be entertaining if it is done with love, insight and skill.
It comes down to the power of iconography and the way the brain works.
I'll try to sum this up quickly.
See, in the West, people program their brains from an early age in the art of drawing. Everybody does this in primary school, learning how to push a pencil through all the 26 letters of the alphabet. And that's where it ends. Once we learn the basic alpha-numeric symbols, we never need learn how to draw another new picture again.
By contrast, in Japan and other Asian nations, (as I am sure you are aware), the written language contains thousands of characters. --I don't believe a student is allowed to graduate in Japan until s/he has memorized and mastered the ability to perfectly reproduce somewhere in the neighborhood of around 2000 different pictographs. In China, that number is multiplied several times.
Now in young, still-forming children, this kind of repetitive hand-eye training does things to the way the pathways in the brain are shaped. I strongly believe that it goes a long way to shaping behavior patterns and different ways of approaching problem solving. And since every Japanese person must go through this process, the end result is a culture which is literally wired differently from the ground up than the cultures of Europe and America.
And when it comes to the graphic arts. ..
There are dozens of ways this affects the animation/comics industry in Japan. For one thing, all the artists and animators over there have been forced to practice a very tightly controlled form of graphic expression from a very young age. It seems to me that these patterns must indirectly result in a strong measure of conformity throughout many creative endeavors involving pens, pencils and paint brushes! Anime and Manga all look very, very similar, regardless of the artist or the studio, whereas in the West, different production houses come up with radically different approaches to solving the graphic problems as presented by comic books and animation.
Next, because there exists such a culture-wide conformity in the approach to comics illustration and animation, and because it has existed for such a long time, the anmie/manga style has been refined into a very, very effective method for communicating ideas and emotions through simple icons.
In the West, there are a few similar examples. Bugs Bunny literally took decades to refine into the slick series of drawing solutions we see today. The Disney style is another example of a highly refined and effective set of graphic solutions to the problem of 'communication through drawings'.
But neither Bugs nor Mickey come from the same league as the machine which produces popular Anime characters! Where Disney is one studio trying to maintain a signature style, (with limited success, I might add!), every studio in Japan is part of the same force behind the continuance and slow evolution of the Anime style.
Now, as to why exactly so many Westerners find the Japanese style so powerful. ..
I think it has to do with the fact that Westerners are, without massive training, simply not wired in the ways necessary to draw and express themselves through the Anime style. It seems to me that this highly refined, alien quality engages interest simply because it is something out of reach.
It is also a style which is driven by pop-art media. That is, manga and anime are fully caught up in that engine which specifically tries to refine itself so as to tantalize and lure and otherwise capture the attention of the viewer to the highest degree possible. And as we all know, viewers = profit.
Next, many of the stories told through in the Anime style are written by and for a youth market. That means, among other things, that sex and love and young fantasies of beautiful, exciting lives are the endless subject matter explored to a fever-pitch in the animated series and comic books sold throughout Japan.
Spirited Away did not follow the standard formula that we usually see here in the West in pop film. Perhaps you are not yet done with your own exploration of this aspect of culture. No problem there, I suppose. Spirited Away was certainly not a piece of formula movie making!
Interestingly, children seemed to respond very well to the film, despite its length. I think this might be because the film was effective on a level kids could understand, and because young children have not yet been fully programmed by culture as to what they are 'supposed' to find acceptable in the media they are offered. Kids are much more open to alternative ways of thinking than adults, who have been programmed and de-sensitized to such a high degree.
Of course, one might also argue that kids are simply not savvy enough to spot crap when they see it, but I think there's more going on here than that. This film was not crappy in any sense, (except in that it violated a host of Hollywood formula 'rules'.) This film was perhaps my favorite Miyazaki film to date. Very, very smart. Very insightful on many levels. There were some brilliant things done in that film, and the background works were awe inspiring. I came out of the film practically bouncing. --And I typically can't stand Anime. Miyazaki is in a whole other league of film makers. He's not one of the teeming hoards of Japanese animators still dealing with teen angst, sex and self-confidence issues which practically scream from the screens of most Anime. --Nothing wrong with that, mind you. It's obviously a required vent and forum for dealing with such issues in the otherwise unbearable pressure cooker that is Japanese culture. But such things are driven primarily by the subconscious. Miyazaki is waaaay beyond that. Miyazaki is mature in that he works with great skill from the conscious level. He knows what he is doing, and why. He is one of those creators who is in fact able to speak to the subconscious.
A good measure, for me anyway, of a film's worth is whether or not I notice my bum beginning to hurt in the theatre chair. If I do, then obviously I'm not entirely engaged by the film. This is a great, 'benchmark', (sorry), particularly with films which are as long as Spirited Away. Almost three hours!
An interesting experiment you might try is this. ..
Rent Raiders of the Lost Ark and watch it. If I am not very much mistaken, then I expect you'll find it to be a rather slow, almost boring film. Amazing, considering that in the eighties, it was one of the fastest, most exciting bits of movie making ever made. I believe that this is an indicator both of just how much the speed of culture has increased, and the level of competition amongst movie makers to make each successive film more exciting than the last. A fine example of cultural programming and de-sensitization.
Sorry. I've long held the opinion that Miyazaki is successful exactly because he doesn't make Anime. His work is NOTHING like any of the endlessly identical, candy-coated stuff which proliferates the medium.
My definition of Anime. ..
Small but efficiently used budgets, lots of visual tricks in order to keep expensive animation to a minimum, endlessly re-used and inbred design work which nonetheless remains stylistic & eye-catching, young-minded scripting, a penchant for attaching sex appeal to children, and an obsession with highschools.
It seems evident to me that many Japanese animators are lugging around a LOT of bagage acquired during their educational years, and live in a culture which does not allow the intellectual freedom needed to deal with these issues, and so it leaks out in other ways. This, of course, isn't the only force driving Anime. After all, there is a good deal of entertaining story telling going on, but those deep issues certainly stand out again and again. There is an endless dream-fever feeling in much anime where this stuff is fighting to be sorted out, driven largely, I suspect, by the subconscious.
For me, that describes about 95% of all the anime I've seen. Miyazaki and a few others fall into the remaining 5%, where the creators are operating with much more dexterity from their conscious selves. Miyazaki knows what he's doing and why he's doing it. He's not another kid still dealing with highschool trauma, sex and self-confidence issues.
Spirited Away, if you read Miyazaki's comments on his film, was partly an attempt to show a young girl in a light which is not tainted by the commercialism, sexualism, and other weird obsessions the Japanese experience within the pressure cooker of their society. Miyazaki wanted to show a girl who, through her own human wits and skills as a person, was able to find her way to personal strength and growth. As he put it. ..
". . . Chihiro's being strong enough not to be eaten up is just what makes her a heroine. She is a heroine not because she is beautiful or because she possesses a unique mind. This is the key characteristic of this work, and therefore it is a good story for 10-year-old girls."
Spirited Away also worked on numerous other levels; a film like this can quietly prepare people for the kinds of forces in the spirit world which continue to become more and more prevailant as we progress through these end of times and towards the beginning of the new. There were a lot of messages in this film which spoke directly to the subconscious.
to say that we live in "Fictious times" while there is a very real war going on is sickening. People are over in Iraq dying. ..
I'm fairly certain that Moore is aware that there is a war being fought. The fiction he was referring to was the endless stream of lies which Bush and his gang of criminals used to plunge the U.S. into war. This is what Moore is upset over. This does not make him anti-American. This makes him anti-psychotic/evil politician.
[. ..] what is really interesting is that he is against something whose end result might give the same freedom he just exercised to millions of people who haven't had that freedom in more than 24 years.
You need to do some more reading, my friend. I know it's a VERY challenging task to see through the bullshit when you're within U.S. borders, where thought is so tightly controled, but trust me, you really don't have a clue how bad it is until you leave the U.S. umbrella of cultural manipulation.
It's a tribute to the skill of U.S. propaganda engineers that so many people in the audience booed Moore. I've been looking for a way to measure just how many people had really been duped. I didn't realize it was so many!
Mind you, I haven't been paying much attention to television as a whole over the last couple of years, and as a result, I haven't watched more than a handful of episodes of any program, let alone a full season.
However. ..
I think Enterprise does a fine job. The writing is (mostly) smart, and I've really enjoyed the Temporal Cold War episodes I've seen. They remind me of the Matrix in that the metaphor is barely a gauze curtain away from how things really work. I find the show especially fascinating for that reason alone!
Plus you've also got the Bad Guys chanelling their messages through the writers. As a result, I think, we have seen the Vulcans, (the metaphoric stand-ins for today's humans who meditate and think in more spiritual terms), acting like dangerous assholes. Plus I remember a weird episode where the crew introduced an alien life form into another biosphere without any thought of consequences. Creepy stuff like that. ..
In any case, I find the battling positive/negative messages in the war for the American mind quite amazing to watch. Star Trek, being built almost entirely upon fantasy and metaphor, provides an interesting view of the battle field which other television does not.
The problem is that Enterprise does not do as much to continue the Star Trek tradition of everything looking and feeling like a comic book adventure universe. --Where everybody is dressed in primary colors, (or those cynical, 'new and cool' dark and gritty colors on DS9.) In any event, Enterprise just isn't as escapist as previous efforts. And people do love their escapism, particularly during times like these!
Where the show does fall a little short, however, is that it is not as expansive as DS9. It's a repetition of an old theme. Astronauts doing stuff in a big space-submarine. Military command structure and all that. These days, I'm more interested in the story universe than in the doings of a singe ship. TNG was good in its time, because it was New and Interesting. We, as viewers, were exploring a new universe, and what better way than in an exploration vessel? DS9 was a reasonably good expansion, in that the universe had been established and the viewer having been familiarized, was taken to a hot-bed of cultural activity where more complex stories could unfold.
Voyager was something else again, though was pretty painful to watch until Jeri Ryan (sp?) found her way into the cast. (D-cup jokes aside, I think everybody was surprised by just how much she improved the show.)
I think Enterprise is quite engaging. I'll watch it when its on and I happen to have nothing else to do, and I'll probably enjoy it. For me, that's saying a lot. The problem is that these days, television as an entire medium is losing its appeal. The world is just too interesting to want to miss in favor of television.
In any case, if I had my choice and it had to be television, I wouldn't mind dispensing with the Starship/Starbase conceit in Trek altogether. I'd rather simply follow a number of interesting characters through their lives in a big and fascinating universe.
Of course, that's already been done, I suppose. In a galaxy far, far away. ..
Regional pricing schemes aren't entirely unfair, (because property taxes and retail space pricing also varies for the seller). Age-differentiated pricing is fine as well, simply because everybody knows kids don't have jobs, but should be allowed to participate in some of society's social and entertainment areas regardless. Give kids a break because they're kids. This stuff is fair.
What Amazon and similar companies are doing is NOT an attempt to be fair, or to offset regionally different taxes and rental costs. They are doing it because they are greedy assholes who want to rip you off. Period.
They don't charge more for IE users than they do for Mozilla users based on perceived income levels. For fuck's sake! They do it because they know that IE users are more likely to be dumb fucking sheep who have rolled over and given up, or who never had the wherewithall to wake up to the fact that they were being scammed in the first place. Using IE is tantamount to wearing a big bright, "I'm A Shill, Rip Me Off," Tee-shirt.
I should add, of course, that this does not include any here who use IE for other reasons and who are not unaware. You know who you are, and those of you who don't, come on down and visit my web site! --I've got a sale on some shitty but very popular movies you might want to buy!
I've been ripped off by Amazon before; anything you ship them by accident, (UPS driver switched the labels by accident between the small package and the big package), mysteriously 'vanish' in Amazon's accounting system so that you can't reclaim or bill for the goods, but the bastards sell the product anyway.
I was tempted to make my next shipment in the form of a pipe. --But I seriously doubted it would kill the bastards who really deserved it. So I'm holding off until I can devise some other method of mayhem which is more pin-point accurate. (And if you're some government spook getting a hard-on: I'm joking, you stupid asshole. I'm not really a plumber.)
selling out *what*, pray tell? Selling out on someone else's notion of what's 'kool'?
There is Honesty and there is Dishonesty. There is Service to Self and there is Service to Others. There is Creation and there is Destruction. ..
'Selling Out' is what we call it when somebody shifts away from Honest, Other-Serving, Creative behavior patterns so that they embrace dishonest, self-serving, destructive patterns. --And they do it because they had a price and somebody named it.
In a word, people sell their *integrity*. Pray told.
And, surprise! --As it happens I don't actually think that this is, 'kool'.
Who cares about being called a loser by some counter-culture LOSER when you'll have made a ton of money from "selling out"?
Oh, but they DO care. Deep down, the ego winces as an important piece of one's soul dies. This is why there is such energy invested in denial and in arguing the rationality of selling out, etc.
I've seen this before in numerous industries. There's no faster way to kill a movement or deep-six yourself than to jump on the greed train. Ironically, you won't even make any money this way. People who sold out in the sixties and became Yupies did so simply by getting jobs. --Bloggers are different. When they sell out, they're dumping their premier product; Honest Voice. --Which leave them exactly nowhere.
Imagine, for instance if you found out one day that Wil Wheaton didn't actually like any of the books and CD's and stuff he promotes on his site? --If Dr Pepper was getting the privilege by giving Wil free baseball caps and as much of their wet-fart drink as he could keep down.
Wil would lose his respect in an instant and become just another loser.
Of course, I may be wrong. I have this endless tendency, no matter how low my opinion of the Average Slob drops, to assume that people are offended by this kind of thing the same way I am. I forget that many people actually have a 'favorite corporation' and wear their swishes and arm bands with pride.
you have seemed to forget about how AOL also has [1] several thousand employees, if not many more. [2] an entire network infastructure to support AOL.com and its many other domains and websites(all the AOL keyword websites are hosted on AOL Servers), its 35 million users. Im sure that costs a few dollars or so. [3] countless dollars invested in Research, Marketing and those damned Free AOL CD's
Awww. Poor AOL. They have overhead like every other company on the planet.
YOU seem to forget that they don't actually make anything. They don't lay cable. They don't do any real R&D. They don't need to constantly buy raw materials, or pay to ship anything, (or alternatively manage a fleet of trucks). In fact, most of the costs which chew up most of the revenue in other companies are entirely absent with AOL. All they do is manage information; they're a glorified switching company. The phone companies run the exact same racket, and they don't seem to have any trouble racking up billion dollar profits. --And they lay cable and do R&D, and build switching systems. If AOL can't make a profit in their Playskool business environment, then they are, as I already suggested, stupid. Though, I might upon reflection, up that to, 'Incredibly Stupid.'
As somebody else pointed out, their primary cause of woe these days is most likely their poor management of the TimeWarner takeover. (ie, Stupidity.)
I have no sympathy for AOL. They're greedy dolts and they deserve to founder.
Ummm, AOL is facing hard times. That idiotic merger with Time Warner isn't doing them any favors right now, and they're bleeding subscribers to their dialup service out the arse. The markup on broadband service is much lower than on dialup, so they're in some serious trouble there.
Well, I did mention 'Stupdity'. I guess I should have tossed in 'Greed' for good measure.
The 35 million customers they say they have is way over inflated. That includes all the people who D/L AIM for free - they're AOL users, they have a screen name and all that, but they don't pay AOL no 23.90 a month.
Nice try, but. ..
You may be right of course, in that AOL's public relations department might have an agenda which requires false figures be broadcast. But all I did to get the 35 million figure was type into Google, "AOL Subscriber Base," (subscribers, meaning people who pay), and then I averaged the returns. I wasn't looking at how many people use AIM, (which is much, much higher).
I was born in 1980, and I still remember the early days of computing. I started with an old TRS-80,
Ah, a Monkey child!
Welcome, Blue Warrior!
--The 80's for a teen, (me), was a plastic-coated, Michael J. Fox inspired, Top-Gun, Indiana Jones & Lucasfilm, John Huges & Coin-op sort of decade where the A-Bombs could still fall at any moment, Anime was still called Japanimation because it was so utterly new that only the coolest of the cool geeks even knew it existed, the music was souless, peppy & candy-coated, and it was still possible to go outside without sun protection and not turn to into a strip of bacon in under twenty minutes. And with fucking Reagan teetering at the helm, the whole thing seemed rather like a surreal theme-park ride. --And theme-parks are certainly fun, especially if you were a teen.
What was it like being under 10 years old during that period? I've never really asked anybody.
Cuz, after all, every decade has its unique delights and horrors to offer its own.
1. Give the service away for free to everybody, promote its use in companies, etc., so that, after a couple of years, "Nobody Can Live Without It."
2. Create an agreement with the other major instant message service providers to implement a pay-per-use system each either at the same time or in quick succession, so that there is no viable competition. This way, each of the big parties makes money and there is nobody for the feeble consumer to turn to. --Sure, this is only pseudo legal, (cartels?), but that's never stopped anybody before. And anyway, you're probably a terrorist.
3. Buy up the competition, bribe service providers so as to ensure low quality, irritating and unreliable service on free systems, and create the illusion that it costs billions of dollars to maintain the internet. Public relate, indirectly advertise, play the 'bleak ecconomic outlook' for all it's worth, and generally tenderize the public like a side of beef so that they'll willingly shell out for something which could easily be as free as water were it not for the creative greedy and their ilk. (And heck, we're paying through the nose for water these days, a vital commodity, and people bought that one, so how tough will it be to sell them on a frivolous toy like AIM?)
--And AOL facing an uncertain financial future? Suuuure they are. Let's do the math:
35 million AOL users x $23.90 a month = $836,500,000 Every Goddamned Month
My calculator ran out of available zeros and gave me an error when I tried to multiply the above by 12, prompting me to institute Lad's Law #3: "A company which produces an over-run error when trying to calculate yearly grosses deserves no sympathy whatsoever."
I can't believe that stupid article had the audacity to claim financial hard times for AOL. The only reason such could be the case is one of three things; Corruption, Stupidity, or Both.
4. Ridicule, harrase and Kill anybody who gets in the way.
Voila! Free money!
It's not that nobody's figured out how to make money off the internet, it's that only a the top layer of assholes have, and everybody else is just chump-fodder for the show.
But then nobody has ever accused AOLers of being particularly bright, have they?
Dungeon Master was the best first-person D&D adventure experience I ever had on a computer.
You could pick up and throw anything in that game! And I swear, sitting there, 15 years old or whatever I was, in my basement bedroom at 4:00 in the A.M. after having started playing shortly after getting home from school the previous day. . . (Heck, I even skipped Letterman!), partly due to the still undigested dazzling newness of the game's graphics and design, partly because of the incredible stereo sounds, (and partly because I was already in a basement), I looked up and blinked at one point, realizing that my body and senses had adjusted so that they really believed they were 18 levels deep beneath the earth. Like leaning during a flight sim, but on a grand scale. . , No game has ever done that to me before or since. Possibly being 15 had something to do with it as well.
Dark Forces was also incredibly cool from a newness and game play perspective, (Doom was just a little too dumb and morbid for me to really care; It never asked me to do anything I would have honestly given my life to achieve, steal the Death Star plans! I mean, holy shit! Leia and friends were counting on me! --Remember, Dark Forces was pre-crap Star Wars). And Command & Conquer was pretty mind-blowing as well. And Half-Life was the best written one of the lot. But I swear, DM is still perhaps only the third-last watershed innovation in computer gaming, which is saying an enormous amount considering when it came out! Nearly everything since has been a photocopy of a photocopy with little more than better graphics and broader scope to offer.
It is probably a personal perspective thing to some degree, (and what isn't?), the latest game experience may be similarly spectacular and exciting for a young kid with his first computer, --though how can young kids today ever know the experience of discovering computers?; rather, these days one is born into computers. So that variety of 'Newness' isn't really something a kid can live through in quite the same way. . , (Like the early days of the industrial/scientific revolution when people were not jaded, and Sherlock Holmes would cry with a sparkle, "Watson, with me!" and throw a revolver into his pocket before leaping out into the land of wonders, where magic and science still co-mingled; where all of the world had not yet been explored.), but for me at any rate, the days of basement bedrooms turned dungeon, and open-eyed awe for the sheer brilliance of computer innovation are long, long gone.
Ah sweet innocence! I tell you, the 70's was the last great decade to be born in.
My point is that extrordinary claims require extrordinary evidence.
Meme. --Designed to lock people in place in terms of awareness. People think that extraordinary evidence is required when standard, run of the mill evidence is all you need. For instance. ..
1: It's true. The USgov is controlling everyone's thought (except yours) and you are the only one (outside the conspiracy) who knows about it.
You make it sound big and bad, when really, all you need is basic television broadcasting to do the lion's share of the social programming. It's unbelievably effective, to the point where it affects nearly all of our decisions and behavior patterns, it tells us what to desire, what and when to feel, and it is so ubiquitous as to be virtually invisible. The most effective piece of advertising ever perpetrated upon the masses is that, "Advertising doesn't really affect you." That's mind control, and what extraordinary evidence do I need? None. But people have been conditioned to think that claiming that people are programmed does need extraordinary evidence. So when I cannot provide anything which rates above 'mundane', people think, "Ah, see? It's nothing."
--This whole war with Iraq has been sold to the bulk of the American people through such basic methods. The fact that Bush hasn't been impeached, (or dragged out and shot for his many mis-deeds and lies), is evidence of just how effective it has been!
The manipulations of the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum, while more exotic and secret, are more used just as mood amplifiers and modifiers. It is no scientific secret that one can use EM to modify behavior, mood and mental states. --Well, even though this is scientifically accepted, the public has been led away from looking at this fact and as such, will respond primarily with disbelief. But the science itself isn't hidden, it just isn't given top billing air time. But it is commonly accessible knowledge; it's not locked away. You can easily find some decent articles and papers, and I can give you some book titles written by respected scientists, but none of it is extraordinary, and as such it is not evidence which will be able to satisfy the requirements of the "Extraordinary claims. .."meme.
The same goes for many of the other methods of controlling people. --That anti-depressant drugs have been pushed with such force and success upon Americas is no secret. All one need do is some very basic research to find out what exactly those drugs do to one's ability to think and make decisions; on how much more receptive people become to suggestion.
All you have to do is some cursory reading in a few of these subjects to start to see what is going on. Yet very, very few people do that. They have been led to believe that there isn't anything extraordinary going on, and so why should they bother looking? --Circular logic, which takes one exactly no place. Leaves one watching CNN and nodding in time to the beat.
Indeed, the real question is not so much whether or not the tools for social programming are in place, because they clearly are, rather the question becomes, "is there a deliberate use of those tools going on?"
Again, you don't have to dig very far at all to discover the answer to that question! But the first step is the most difficult. One must get up from the couch and make the effort. You have to get out of the information rut you are in, and you have to dig. One cannot sit on one's ass and demand extraordinary evidence, because that is exactly what people have been told to do by those who don't want anybody seeing what is really happening.
--Think about it; where did you hear that phrase? "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Yes, because it is a meme, you most often heard it repeated by the people around you, but where did they first hear it? Where did it come from? Answer this question and you'll have found an important clue.
Here's one example. ..
One of the most effective bits of social programming has comes from the simple court room drama as seen endlessly aired on countless television programs. People have been hammered by the methods of the legal system; so hammered that they unconsciously apply those methods to all aspects of their lives.
The most important key factor being that, "The Burden of Proof lies with the accuser."
Allow me to illustrate. ..
The jury (the public) sits in the jury box. They are not allowed to read newspapers or watch television or interact in any way with the outside world during the course of the trial. (They are not allowed to seek answers for themselves, but must content themselves only with the information prepared and performed for them by the lawyers on the court room stage.) They are then instructed to reach a determination of massive and final importance; the guilt or innocence of the accused based solely on this information. What they will make the binding decision to believe. No changing minds later. After the court room presentation, the jury's belief is not allowed to change; it must be fixed and set.
Now while this is a fairly sensible system for resolving legal dilemmas, it is an absolutely lousy system for day to day living, for building one's personal belief structures. --But look around! People, for the most part, have been successfully trained to not look for anything themselves, to listen only to the arguments presented by the television, (while they sit in their living room jury boxes). And television is just a shadow play. The Punch & Judy puppets televised in heated debate are worn by only one performer. The people who own the media. The court room drama is fixed. Look around!
People, (you for instance), when confronted by a fascinating new concept do not automatically go to look for themselves --Which, I think, is a most un-natural reaction. Just look at a child to see how people behaved before the programming took hold; "I saw a turtle in the back yard!" "Wow! Really?!" --And all the kids run off to see for themselves. They are proactive in their learning. They don't sit around in the living room demanding not just proof, but extraordinary proof! --And then heaping ridicule when the first kid is unable to provide it.
And really, what proof, short of bringing a live turtle into the house, can anybody possibly provide? Photographic or video evidence is never unconvincing. Witness testimony is worthless. Indeed, since it is strategically impossible to bring a live turtle into the living room of every lazy American, the only 'proof' which has any value is that of the Very Serious Authority Figure as presented by the Very Serious CNN Media Channel. Mind-games and nothing more!
Look around! This is how people really behave! --I say people have been programmed by the government and corporate world, and you suggest I am, (how did you put it. ..) "wearing a tin-foil beanie", and tell me I provide no evidence? Well, what the heck can I do? Other than write reams of argumentative prose like this stuff you're reading now, I can't do a damned thing. The only way people can learn is to get up and go out into the back yard and get their knees grubby. To do their own thinking and cross referencing. --If you want, I can put together a bunch of hyperlinks to various articles I have come across, but that's nothing you can't do for yourself, and in any case, the internet is just a start. Books are better, and direct experience and your own cognitive skills are the very best of all. In the end, it's up to you.
I must apologize if this all makes you feel annoyed, but I can honestly say that the arguments you give are very hackneyed photocopies of photocopies. "Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence." --Responses you have been instructed to give in order that you be prevented from waking up.
It sucks to learn that one has been running on auto-pilot, and it sucks even more to realize that the auto-pilot was built by somebody other than yourself. It sucks to have been made a fool. I know; I've been there. But truth hurts. Undoing these knots and facing the crushed ego is called "Dying the little death," and it is a necessary part of real growth, and it is hard and it hurts. --Indeed, it hurts so much that many people simply refuse to try. Denial is much more sweet and easy. Many people will never consider honestly that their minds are not their own. Not even for a fraction of a minute.
I liked a few of of your posts, for the first couple of paragraphs, before you went off on a tangent about huge government mind-control conspiracies. You tinfoil-beanie types give all of us with legitimate concerns about privacy a bad name.
Heck, people were calling me a conspiracy nut when I was bitching about this stuff long before 9-11, talking about the upcoming world war, psychotic leaders, American concentration camps, economic collapses and such; when none of it was anything more than a whiff upon the wind.
So by my score card, I'm the guy with the clue and you're just another well-meaning dude behind the 8-ball.
There are three stages. ..
1. Denial, Denial, Denial! Swamp gas! We're all stocked up on stupid here! Shut up or we'll kill you!
2. Oh.
3. Yeah, well, we knew it all along. And anyway, it's not so special.
Basically, I'm a few steps ahead of you. I'm just pointing out the land mines as I pass them. I've been asked sometimes why I bother, but the fact of the matter is that knowledge clogs the arteries if you staunch its flow. So peace to you man, and step where you will.
So I'll interpret that as, "I can't think of a good counter-argument, so instead I'll just sputter and fume about how I fuck my mother. Yeah. That'll show him! Heh Heh! Me is smartest!"
But you do raise an interesting thought. You and your type, (the brain-damaged simpletons of the U.S.), will probably be among the last to be carted off; that is, you're too dumb to pose any threat to the Powers That Be. --You do as you are told and you don't mind working in the salt mines. --And heck, you'll even probably bludgeon any dissidents into pulp if told to by the wise, wise television talky person news head. You're the model citizen!
I've said it a few times before in a few places, but it bears repeating. ..
Homeland passes. Here's what to do. (This post was a little intense sounding, but still, I believe, entirely valid. It's interesting to look back at where we were in November; not just at how the unimaginable happened, but how it now feels normal).
A German Jew on why he didn't get out in time. (This post is REALLY informative; it's a story by a German Jew who explains how he let all the warning signs slip past him and didn't get out before the Nazi axe fell. Read this one! It's gold.)
Slashdot Mirror
Continental Europe is eventually going to rise up and hammer an over-extended U.S. into bloody pulp. --France certainly had the balls to tell the U.S. to fuck off when it counted. That's FAR more than one can say about the average American citizen who, for all their gun-toting bravado, allowed a coke-head criminal to steal away their precious democratic government without a single shot being fired.
And if you knew your history, (which you probably don't), then you'd know that Athens, against all odds, defeated power hungry Atlantis waaaay back during the last incarnation of all these end of the world theatrics.
Think I'm nuts? If you manage to survive the next seven years or so in America, (which, is going to be tougher than you think!), then you'll get to watch it all unfold for yourself. Enjoy.
-Fantastic Lad
And I've noticed that posters with login ID numbers which are over 500,000 are prone to sounding like commercially fabricated idiots who still believe what their high school text books told them.
This is, of course, not true of all such posters! But it certainly seems to apply this guy. Why is that? Is it a product of youthful naivite? Or is it simply that all the dis-info artists were caught off guard when they realized that Slashdot was becoming a forum of both influence and actual thought among the all-powerful geek sector which controls the well being of American technology?
I wonder. .
-Fantastic Lad
There's plenty of unique-looking manga out there.
Plenty? Not quite. There is some. Miyazaki, is an excellent example. Nothing looks at all like Nausicaa. He defies several chipped-in-stone Manga conventions simply by drawing everything free-hand, including panal borders! But I certainly wouldn't characterize Miyazaki as a typical manga artist, and neither do I call his work Anime. There is nothing pop-art or fan-boy about anything Miyazaki creates. He exists within his own category.
Mind you, I am talking in generalizations when I say that most Manga is very similar looking, but when it comes to Anime and Manga, I think those generalizations are more than justified!
I also want to add that I don't have anything against Manga and Anime. When you first discover it, it's all a mountain of fun! As I always say, formulas work for a reason. I just happened to get my fill of it ten years ago. Once you begin to comprehend that there are indeed formulas and hack-artists and all that, then you are ready to graduate to more complicated forms of expression within the same medium. --And that doesn't mean one can't also sit down and enjoy an episode of 'Bebop' or what have you. (I haven't tried, but I am assured my time would not be wasted.) Even an old and tired formula can be entertaining if it is done with love, insight and skill.
-Fantastic Lad
It comes down to the power of iconography and the way the brain works.
.
.
I'll try to sum this up quickly.
See, in the West, people program their brains from an early age in the art of drawing. Everybody does this in primary school, learning how to push a pencil through all the 26 letters of the alphabet. And that's where it ends. Once we learn the basic alpha-numeric symbols, we never need learn how to draw another new picture again.
By contrast, in Japan and other Asian nations, (as I am sure you are aware), the written language contains thousands of characters. --I don't believe a student is allowed to graduate in Japan until s/he has memorized and mastered the ability to perfectly reproduce somewhere in the neighborhood of around 2000 different pictographs. In China, that number is multiplied several times.
Now in young, still-forming children, this kind of repetitive hand-eye training does things to the way the pathways in the brain are shaped. I strongly believe that it goes a long way to shaping behavior patterns and different ways of approaching problem solving. And since every Japanese person must go through this process, the end result is a culture which is literally wired differently from the ground up than the cultures of Europe and America.
And when it comes to the graphic arts. .
There are dozens of ways this affects the animation/comics industry in Japan. For one thing, all the artists and animators over there have been forced to practice a very tightly controlled form of graphic expression from a very young age. It seems to me that these patterns must indirectly result in a strong measure of conformity throughout many creative endeavors involving pens, pencils and paint brushes! Anime and Manga all look very, very similar, regardless of the artist or the studio, whereas in the West, different production houses come up with radically different approaches to solving the graphic problems as presented by comic books and animation.
Next, because there exists such a culture-wide conformity in the approach to comics illustration and animation, and because it has existed for such a long time, the anmie/manga style has been refined into a very, very effective method for communicating ideas and emotions through simple icons.
In the West, there are a few similar examples. Bugs Bunny literally took decades to refine into the slick series of drawing solutions we see today. The Disney style is another example of a highly refined and effective set of graphic solutions to the problem of 'communication through drawings'.
But neither Bugs nor Mickey come from the same league as the machine which produces popular Anime characters! Where Disney is one studio trying to maintain a signature style, (with limited success, I might add!), every studio in Japan is part of the same force behind the continuance and slow evolution of the Anime style.
Now, as to why exactly so many Westerners find the Japanese style so powerful. .
I think it has to do with the fact that Westerners are, without massive training, simply not wired in the ways necessary to draw and express themselves through the Anime style. It seems to me that this highly refined, alien quality engages interest simply because it is something out of reach.
It is also a style which is driven by pop-art media. That is, manga and anime are fully caught up in that engine which specifically tries to refine itself so as to tantalize and lure and otherwise capture the attention of the viewer to the highest degree possible. And as we all know, viewers = profit.
Next, many of the stories told through in the Anime style are written by and for a youth market. That means, among other things, that sex and love and young fantasies of beautiful, exciting lives are the endless subject matter explored to a fever-pitch in the animated series and comic books sold throughout Japan.
When you combine all of th
Interestingly, children seemed to respond very well to the film, despite its length. I think this might be because the film was effective on a level kids could understand, and because young children have not yet been fully programmed by culture as to what they are 'supposed' to find acceptable in the media they are offered. Kids are much more open to alternative ways of thinking than adults, who have been programmed and de-sensitized to such a high degree.
Of course, one might also argue that kids are simply not savvy enough to spot crap when they see it, but I think there's more going on here than that. This film was not crappy in any sense, (except in that it violated a host of Hollywood formula 'rules'.) This film was perhaps my favorite Miyazaki film to date. Very, very smart. Very insightful on many levels. There were some brilliant things done in that film, and the background works were awe inspiring. I came out of the film practically bouncing. --And I typically can't stand Anime. Miyazaki is in a whole other league of film makers. He's not one of the teeming hoards of Japanese animators still dealing with teen angst, sex and self-confidence issues which practically scream from the screens of most Anime. --Nothing wrong with that, mind you. It's obviously a required vent and forum for dealing with such issues in the otherwise unbearable pressure cooker that is Japanese culture. But such things are driven primarily by the subconscious. Miyazaki is waaaay beyond that. Miyazaki is mature in that he works with great skill from the conscious level. He knows what he is doing, and why. He is one of those creators who is in fact able to speak to the subconscious.
A good measure, for me anyway, of a film's worth is whether or not I notice my bum beginning to hurt in the theatre chair. If I do, then obviously I'm not entirely engaged by the film. This is a great, 'benchmark', (sorry), particularly with films which are as long as Spirited Away. Almost three hours!
An interesting experiment you might try is this. .
Rent Raiders of the Lost Ark and watch it. If I am not very much mistaken, then I expect you'll find it to be a rather slow, almost boring film. Amazing, considering that in the eighties, it was one of the fastest, most exciting bits of movie making ever made. I believe that this is an indicator both of just how much the speed of culture has increased, and the level of competition amongst movie makers to make each successive film more exciting than the last. A fine example of cultural programming and de-sensitization.
-Fantastic Lad
My definition of Anime. .
It seems evident to me that many Japanese animators are lugging around a LOT of bagage acquired during their educational years, and live in a culture which does not allow the intellectual freedom needed to deal with these issues, and so it leaks out in other ways. This, of course, isn't the only force driving Anime. After all, there is a good deal of entertaining story telling going on, but those deep issues certainly stand out again and again. There is an endless dream-fever feeling in much anime where this stuff is fighting to be sorted out, driven largely, I suspect, by the subconscious.
For me, that describes about 95% of all the anime I've seen. Miyazaki and a few others fall into the remaining 5%, where the creators are operating with much more dexterity from their conscious selves. Miyazaki knows what he's doing and why he's doing it. He's not another kid still dealing with highschool trauma, sex and self-confidence issues.
Spirited Away, if you read Miyazaki's comments on his film, was partly an attempt to show a young girl in a light which is not tainted by the commercialism, sexualism, and other weird obsessions the Japanese experience within the pressure cooker of their society. Miyazaki wanted to show a girl who, through her own human wits and skills as a person, was able to find her way to personal strength and growth. As he put it. .
". . . Chihiro's being strong enough not to be eaten up is just what makes her a heroine. She is a heroine not because she is beautiful or because she possesses a unique mind. This is the key characteristic of this work, and therefore it is a good story for 10-year-old girls."
Spirited Away also worked on numerous other levels; a film like this can quietly prepare people for the kinds of forces in the spirit world which continue to become more and more prevailant as we progress through these end of times and towards the beginning of the new. There were a lot of messages in this film which spoke directly to the subconscious.
-Fantastic Lad
I'm fairly certain that Moore is aware that there is a war being fought. The fiction he was referring to was the endless stream of lies which Bush and his gang of criminals used to plunge the U.S. into war. This is what Moore is upset over. This does not make him anti-American. This makes him anti-psychotic/evil politician.
[. .
You need to do some more reading, my friend. I know it's a VERY challenging task to see through the bullshit when you're within U.S. borders, where thought is so tightly controled, but trust me, you really don't have a clue how bad it is until you leave the U.S. umbrella of cultural manipulation.
It's a tribute to the skill of U.S. propaganda engineers that so many people in the audience booed Moore. I've been looking for a way to measure just how many people had really been duped. I didn't realize it was so many!
-Fantastic Lad
However. .
I think Enterprise does a fine job. The writing is (mostly) smart, and I've really enjoyed the Temporal Cold War episodes I've seen. They remind me of the Matrix in that the metaphor is barely a gauze curtain away from how things really work. I find the show especially fascinating for that reason alone!
Plus you've also got the Bad Guys chanelling their messages through the writers. As a result, I think, we have seen the Vulcans, (the metaphoric stand-ins for today's humans who meditate and think in more spiritual terms), acting like dangerous assholes. Plus I remember a weird episode where the crew introduced an alien life form into another biosphere without any thought of consequences. Creepy stuff like that. .
In any case, I find the battling positive/negative messages in the war for the American mind quite amazing to watch. Star Trek, being built almost entirely upon fantasy and metaphor, provides an interesting view of the battle field which other television does not.
The problem is that Enterprise does not do as much to continue the Star Trek tradition of everything looking and feeling like a comic book adventure universe. --Where everybody is dressed in primary colors, (or those cynical, 'new and cool' dark and gritty colors on DS9.) In any event, Enterprise just isn't as escapist as previous efforts. And people do love their escapism, particularly during times like these!
Where the show does fall a little short, however, is that it is not as expansive as DS9. It's a repetition of an old theme. Astronauts doing stuff in a big space-submarine. Military command structure and all that. These days, I'm more interested in the story universe than in the doings of a singe ship. TNG was good in its time, because it was New and Interesting. We, as viewers, were exploring a new universe, and what better way than in an exploration vessel? DS9 was a reasonably good expansion, in that the universe had been established and the viewer having been familiarized, was taken to a hot-bed of cultural activity where more complex stories could unfold.
Voyager was something else again, though was pretty painful to watch until Jeri Ryan (sp?) found her way into the cast. (D-cup jokes aside, I think everybody was surprised by just how much she improved the show.)
I think Enterprise is quite engaging. I'll watch it when its on and I happen to have nothing else to do, and I'll probably enjoy it. For me, that's saying a lot. The problem is that these days, television as an entire medium is losing its appeal. The world is just too interesting to want to miss in favor of television.
In any case, if I had my choice and it had to be television, I wouldn't mind dispensing with the Starship/Starbase conceit in Trek altogether. I'd rather simply follow a number of interesting characters through their lives in a big and fascinating universe.
Of course, that's already been done, I suppose. In a galaxy far, far away. .
-Fantastic Lad
What Amazon and similar companies are doing is NOT an attempt to be fair, or to offset regionally different taxes and rental costs. They are doing it because they are greedy assholes who want to rip you off. Period.
They don't charge more for IE users than they do for Mozilla users based on perceived income levels. For fuck's sake! They do it because they know that IE users are more likely to be dumb fucking sheep who have rolled over and given up, or who never had the wherewithall to wake up to the fact that they were being scammed in the first place. Using IE is tantamount to wearing a big bright, "I'm A Shill, Rip Me Off," Tee-shirt.
I should add, of course, that this does not include any here who use IE for other reasons and who are not unaware. You know who you are, and those of you who don't, come on down and visit my web site! --I've got a sale on some shitty but very popular movies you might want to buy!
-Fantastic Lad
I've been ripped off by Amazon before; anything you ship them by accident, (UPS driver switched the labels by accident between the small package and the big package), mysteriously 'vanish' in Amazon's accounting system so that you can't reclaim or bill for the goods, but the bastards sell the product anyway.
I was tempted to make my next shipment in the form of a pipe. --But I seriously doubted it would kill the bastards who really deserved it. So I'm holding off until I can devise some other method of mayhem which is more pin-point accurate. (And if you're some government spook getting a hard-on: I'm joking, you stupid asshole. I'm not really a plumber.)
-Fantastic Lad
There is Honesty and there is Dishonesty. There is Service to Self and there is Service to Others. There is Creation and there is Destruction. .
'Selling Out' is what we call it when somebody shifts away from Honest, Other-Serving, Creative behavior patterns so that they embrace dishonest, self-serving, destructive patterns. --And they do it because they had a price and somebody named it.
In a word, people sell their *integrity*. Pray told.
And, surprise! --As it happens I don't actually think that this is, 'kool'.
-Fantastic Lad
Oh, but they DO care. Deep down, the ego winces as an important piece of one's soul dies. This is why there is such energy invested in denial and in arguing the rationality of selling out, etc.
Anyway, why do you ask?
-Fantastic Lad
Isn't that only one ingredient shy of the, Make Yourself Sick And Stay Home From School, drink?
-Fantastic Lad --Mmm. Pukey.
I've seen this before in numerous industries. There's no faster way to kill a movement or deep-six yourself than to jump on the greed train. Ironically, you won't even make any money this way. People who sold out in the sixties and became Yupies did so simply by getting jobs. --Bloggers are different. When they sell out, they're dumping their premier product; Honest Voice. --Which leave them exactly nowhere.
Imagine, for instance if you found out one day that Wil Wheaton didn't actually like any of the books and CD's and stuff he promotes on his site? --If Dr Pepper was getting the privilege by giving Wil free baseball caps and as much of their wet-fart drink as he could keep down.
Wil would lose his respect in an instant and become just another loser.
Of course, I may be wrong. I have this endless tendency, no matter how low my opinion of the Average Slob drops, to assume that people are offended by this kind of thing the same way I am. I forget that many people actually have a 'favorite corporation' and wear their swishes and arm bands with pride.
-Fantastic Lad
[1] several thousand employees, if not many more.
[2] an entire network infastructure to support AOL.com and its many other domains and websites(all the AOL keyword websites are hosted on AOL Servers), its 35 million users. Im sure that costs a few dollars or so.
[3] countless dollars invested in Research, Marketing and those damned Free AOL CD's
Awww. Poor AOL. They have overhead like every other company on the planet.
YOU seem to forget that they don't actually make anything. They don't lay cable. They don't do any real R&D. They don't need to constantly buy raw materials, or pay to ship anything, (or alternatively manage a fleet of trucks). In fact, most of the costs which chew up most of the revenue in other companies are entirely absent with AOL. All they do is manage information; they're a glorified switching company. The phone companies run the exact same racket, and they don't seem to have any trouble racking up billion dollar profits. --And they lay cable and do R&D, and build switching systems. If AOL can't make a profit in their Playskool business environment, then they are, as I already suggested, stupid. Though, I might upon reflection, up that to, 'Incredibly Stupid.'
As somebody else pointed out, their primary cause of woe these days is most likely their poor management of the TimeWarner takeover. (ie, Stupidity.)
I have no sympathy for AOL. They're greedy dolts and they deserve to founder.
-Fantastic Lad
Well, I did mention 'Stupdity'. I guess I should have tossed in 'Greed' for good measure.
-Fantastic Lad
Nice try, but. .
You may be right of course, in that AOL's public relations department might have an agenda which requires false figures be broadcast. But all I did to get the 35 million figure was type into Google, "AOL Subscriber Base," (subscribers, meaning people who pay), and then I averaged the returns. I wasn't looking at how many people use AIM, (which is much, much higher).
-Fantastic Lad
Ah, a Monkey child!
Welcome, Blue Warrior!
--The 80's for a teen, (me), was a plastic-coated, Michael J. Fox inspired, Top-Gun, Indiana Jones & Lucasfilm, John Huges & Coin-op sort of decade where the A-Bombs could still fall at any moment, Anime was still called Japanimation because it was so utterly new that only the coolest of the cool geeks even knew it existed, the music was souless, peppy & candy-coated, and it was still possible to go outside without sun protection and not turn to into a strip of bacon in under twenty minutes. And with fucking Reagan teetering at the helm, the whole thing seemed rather like a surreal theme-park ride. --And theme-parks are certainly fun, especially if you were a teen.
What was it like being under 10 years old during that period? I've never really asked anybody.
Cuz, after all, every decade has its unique delights and horrors to offer its own.
-Fantastic Lad
You could pick up and throw anything in that game! And I swear, sitting there, 15 years old or whatever I was, in my basement bedroom at 4:00 in the A.M. after having started playing shortly after getting home from school the previous day. . . (Heck, I even skipped Letterman!), partly due to the still undigested dazzling newness of the game's graphics and design, partly because of the incredible stereo sounds, (and partly because I was already in a basement), I looked up and blinked at one point, realizing that my body and senses had adjusted so that they really believed they were 18 levels deep beneath the earth. Like leaning during a flight sim, but on a grand scale. . , No game has ever done that to me before or since. Possibly being 15 had something to do with it as well.
Dark Forces was also incredibly cool from a newness and game play perspective, (Doom was just a little too dumb and morbid for me to really care; It never asked me to do anything I would have honestly given my life to achieve, steal the Death Star plans! I mean, holy shit! Leia and friends were counting on me! --Remember, Dark Forces was pre-crap Star Wars). And Command & Conquer was pretty mind-blowing as well. And Half-Life was the best written one of the lot. But I swear, DM is still perhaps only the third-last watershed innovation in computer gaming, which is saying an enormous amount considering when it came out! Nearly everything since has been a photocopy of a photocopy with little more than better graphics and broader scope to offer.
It is probably a personal perspective thing to some degree, (and what isn't?), the latest game experience may be similarly spectacular and exciting for a young kid with his first computer, --though how can young kids today ever know the experience of discovering computers?; rather, these days one is born into computers. So that variety of 'Newness' isn't really something a kid can live through in quite the same way. . , (Like the early days of the industrial/scientific revolution when people were not jaded, and Sherlock Holmes would cry with a sparkle, "Watson, with me!" and throw a revolver into his pocket before leaping out into the land of wonders, where magic and science still co-mingled; where all of the world had not yet been explored.), but for me at any rate, the days of basement bedrooms turned dungeon, and open-eyed awe for the sheer brilliance of computer innovation are long, long gone.
Ah sweet innocence! I tell you, the 70's was the last great decade to be born in.
-Fantastic Lad
The rest stands, even if it is a somewhat lazy and unpolished posting.
Right-o, then!
-Fantastic Lad
Meme. --Designed to lock people in place in terms of awareness. People think that extraordinary evidence is required when standard, run of the mill evidence is all you need. For instance. .
1: It's true. The USgov is controlling everyone's thought (except yours) and you are the only one (outside the conspiracy) who knows about it.
You make it sound big and bad, when really, all you need is basic television broadcasting to do the lion's share of the social programming. It's unbelievably effective, to the point where it affects nearly all of our decisions and behavior patterns, it tells us what to desire, what and when to feel, and it is so ubiquitous as to be virtually invisible. The most effective piece of advertising ever perpetrated upon the masses is that, "Advertising doesn't really affect you." That's mind control, and what extraordinary evidence do I need? None. But people have been conditioned to think that claiming that people are programmed does need extraordinary evidence. So when I cannot provide anything which rates above 'mundane', people think, "Ah, see? It's nothing."
--This whole war with Iraq has been sold to the bulk of the American people through such basic methods. The fact that Bush hasn't been impeached, (or dragged out and shot for his many mis-deeds and lies), is evidence of just how effective it has been!
The manipulations of the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum, while more exotic and secret, are more used just as mood amplifiers and modifiers. It is no scientific secret that one can use EM to modify behavior, mood and mental states. --Well, even though this is scientifically accepted, the public has been led away from looking at this fact and as such, will respond primarily with disbelief. But the science itself isn't hidden, it just isn't given top billing air time. But it is commonly accessible knowledge; it's not locked away. You can easily find some decent articles and papers, and I can give you some book titles written by respected scientists, but none of it is extraordinary, and as such it is not evidence which will be able to satisfy the requirements of the "Extraordinary claims. .
The same goes for many of the other methods of controlling people. --That anti-depressant drugs have been pushed with such force and success upon Americas is no secret. All one need do is some very basic research to find out what exactly those drugs do to one's ability to think and make decisions; on how much more receptive people become to suggestion.
All you have to do is some cursory reading in a few of these subjects to start to see what is going on. Yet very, very few people do that. They have been led to believe that there isn't anything extraordinary going on, and so why should they bother looking? --Circular logic, which takes one exactly no place. Leaves one watching CNN and nodding in time to the beat.
Indeed, the real question is not so much whether or not the tools for social programming are in place, because they clearly are, rather the question becomes, "is there a deliberate use of those tools going on?"
Again, you don't have to dig very far at all to discover the answer to that question! But the first step is the most difficult. One must get up from the couch and make the effort. You have to get out of the information rut you are in, and you have to dig. One cannot sit on one's ass and demand extraordinary evidence, because that is exactly what people have been told to do by those who don't want anybody seeing what is really happening.
--Think about it; where did you hear that phrase? "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Yes, because it is a meme, you most often heard it repeated by the people around you, but where did they first hear it? Where did it come from? Answer this question and you'll have found an important clue.
Here's one example. .
One of the most effective bits of social programming has comes from the simple court room drama as seen endlessly aired on countless television programs. People have been hammered by the methods of the legal system; so hammered that they unconsciously apply those methods to all aspects of their lives.
The most important key factor being that, "The Burden of Proof lies with the accuser."
Allow me to illustrate. .
The jury (the public) sits in the jury box. They are not allowed to read newspapers or watch television or interact in any way with the outside world during the course of the trial. (They are not allowed to seek answers for themselves, but must content themselves only with the information prepared and performed for them by the lawyers on the court room stage.) They are then instructed to reach a determination of massive and final importance; the guilt or innocence of the accused based solely on this information. What they will make the binding decision to believe. No changing minds later. After the court room presentation, the jury's belief is not allowed to change; it must be fixed and set.
Now while this is a fairly sensible system for resolving legal dilemmas, it is an absolutely lousy system for day to day living, for building one's personal belief structures. --But look around! People, for the most part, have been successfully trained to not look for anything themselves, to listen only to the arguments presented by the television, (while they sit in their living room jury boxes). And television is just a shadow play. The Punch & Judy puppets televised in heated debate are worn by only one performer. The people who own the media. The court room drama is fixed. Look around!
People, (you for instance), when confronted by a fascinating new concept do not automatically go to look for themselves --Which, I think, is a most un-natural reaction. Just look at a child to see how people behaved before the programming took hold; "I saw a turtle in the back yard!" "Wow! Really?!" --And all the kids run off to see for themselves. They are proactive in their learning. They don't sit around in the living room demanding not just proof, but extraordinary proof! --And then heaping ridicule when the first kid is unable to provide it.
And really, what proof, short of bringing a live turtle into the house, can anybody possibly provide? Photographic or video evidence is never unconvincing. Witness testimony is worthless. Indeed, since it is strategically impossible to bring a live turtle into the living room of every lazy American, the only 'proof' which has any value is that of the Very Serious Authority Figure as presented by the Very Serious CNN Media Channel. Mind-games and nothing more!
Look around! This is how people really behave! --I say people have been programmed by the government and corporate world, and you suggest I am, (how did you put it. .
I must apologize if this all makes you feel annoyed, but I can honestly say that the arguments you give are very hackneyed photocopies of photocopies. "Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence." --Responses you have been instructed to give in order that you be prevented from waking up.
It sucks to learn that one has been running on auto-pilot, and it sucks even more to realize that the auto-pilot was built by somebody other than yourself. It sucks to have been made a fool. I know; I've been there. But truth hurts. Undoing these knots and facing the crushed ego is called "Dying the little death," and it is a necessary part of real growth, and it is hard and it hurts. --Indeed, it hurts so much that many people simply refuse to try. Denial is much more sweet and easy. Many people will never consider honestly that their minds are not their own. Not even for a fraction of a minute.
I wonder what kind of person you are. .
-Fantastic Lad
Heck, people were calling me a conspiracy nut when I was bitching about this stuff long before 9-11, talking about the upcoming world war, psychotic leaders, American concentration camps, economic collapses and such; when none of it was anything more than a whiff upon the wind.
So by my score card, I'm the guy with the clue and you're just another well-meaning dude behind the 8-ball.
There are three stages. .
Basically, I'm a few steps ahead of you. I'm just pointing out the land mines as I pass them. I've been asked sometimes why I bother, but the fact of the matter is that knowledge clogs the arteries if you staunch its flow. So peace to you man, and step where you will.
-Fantastic Lad
So I'll interpret that as, "I can't think of a good counter-argument, so instead I'll just sputter and fume about how I fuck my mother. Yeah. That'll show him! Heh Heh! Me is smartest!"
But you do raise an interesting thought. You and your type, (the brain-damaged simpletons of the U.S.), will probably be among the last to be carted off; that is, you're too dumb to pose any threat to the Powers That Be. --You do as you are told and you don't mind working in the salt mines. --And heck, you'll even probably bludgeon any dissidents into pulp if told to by the wise, wise television talky person news head. You're the model citizen!
I stand before you in awe!
-Fantastic Lad
I've said it a few times before in a few places, but it bears repeating. . .
Homeland passes. Here's what to do. (This post was a little intense sounding, but still, I believe, entirely valid. It's interesting to look back at where we were in November; not just at how the unimaginable happened, but how it now feels normal).
A German Jew on why he didn't get out in time. (This post is REALLY informative; it's a story by a German Jew who explains how he let all the warning signs slip past him and didn't get out before the Nazi axe fell. Read this one! It's gold.)
-Fantastic Lad