There are many many normal kids who don't need to resist and never get bullied in the first place.
I'm telling you how to be THAT guy.
I understood your "key" point perfectly. That's because it's the same "key" point the article was making. The reason everybody is griping about that "key" point is due to it's being 100% wrong. I was making an effort to explain why this is the case, but it doesn't look like you're going to get it.
Don't worry. Some people simply don't see in color.
I'd be very surprised if this technology doesn't already exist.
Richard Dolan speaks here about what he terms the, "Break Away Civilization".
The idea being that black budget technology is so advanced, has been growing of its own accord for so long, and is so impossible to reveal given its nature, the result is that people working within its structure are essentially no longer dealing with the same reality as the rest of us. The slaves get sticks and fire while the master of the house gets to use the current technology. The only difference here being that the slaves don't even get to see the technology made possible by their sweat and bondage.
At 3:30 on that video. . , I think I just saw the future.
The laptop and the netbook I picked up last Summer, and even the PC's I've been running over the past few years are all about to fall into the same category as my Dad's old stereo system. -Where the shape and weight of a given device will no longer be determined by space requirements of the technology packed inside. Every square inch inside my Dad's old amplifier was strategically taken up with vacuum tube electronics whereas the modern gear I could buy as a teenager was mostly empty space inside sleek plastic boxes with big shiny knobs. Empty calories.
Which probably means that it won't be long before netbooks and laptops are craptastic princess-pink or G.I. Joe themed items complete with dirty finger prints available at garage sales or brand new clattering around in the calculator section at the local Office Depot. The laptop you are using right now, while it is (most likely) a humming, energy hungry heat monster, will nonetheless ooze solid-state build quality and a healthy heft when compared to the next generation of light-as-air junk tech.
And when I think about it. . .
A lot of super-popular electronic media technology has come and gone over the last thirty years. Tape decks? Gone. Portable CD players? Gone. VCR's? Gone. The humble telephone? Changed beyond recognition. Here's a quiz: What's the one piece of technology which has stayed the same throughout that whole period?
That's right! Headphones and the 1/8" audio jack. Apparently we've arrived at perfection with audio gear. Everything else has changed.
I wonder what the final expression of the video display will end up being. . .
I>Time flies when having fun, and as one gets older, one is allowed to do more fun things.
By this logic, everything should be reversed; most people have a lot more fun when they're kids, and as you point out, more responsibility (thus, drudgery) as adults. Time should be practically crawling uphill by the time we're in our 30's.
Of course, I know you're joking, but actually. . .
However if you feel good about yourself, and you feel that you're valuable just because you're a human being, you then will be able to treat others with the greatest true respect. They will pick up on that. They will love how it feels and they will WANT to be your friend.
This is great, but it only works when everybody is built the same way.
Fundamental, biological fact: Psychopaths exist and it is impossible for them to respond to love. In fact, telling people, when abused, to simply amp up the love they broadcast is a wonderful thing for the psychopath. They'll happily gobble up whatever you give them and then kick you some more. It is my personal belief that the whole Christ dying on a cross thing was a deliberate and false bit of social programming designed to make feeding easier. "Turn the other cheek" is a great thing for all the sheep to have hard-wired into their brains - if you are a psychopath. The only way to deal with a psychopath is to recognize the traits and RESIST them. It's not that difficult. It's shark hunting; sharks always respond according to their own behavior and thus they can be predicted and mapped, but first you have to educate yourself and not pretend yourself into danger by saying such comforting things as, "Everybody just needs love!" Not every human is really human.
It is estimated that about 6% of the global population is psychopathic. That's 1 in approximately 16 people. --And it stands to reason that power centers, companies, cities and entire countries which promote and reward self-serving and abusive behavior are going to attract psychopathic individuals. It is safe to assume that the concentrations of psychopaths will be much higher than 6% in some areas. And even if that isn't the case, the spread of cruel-assholes throughout my old school dayss was easily around 1 in 16.
I'd also mention Lynn Johnston, (For Better or For Worse) and more recently, Scott Adams, (Dilbert).
Jim Davis DID rock the world, but he made that mistake Watterson talked about. He didn't know when to quit. He became a vulgar reminder.
And those four guys were also from a specific era; the one which flourished at the final height of the Newspaper Strip. Those heights will never be reached again, (and looking at the fare offered by the current team of cartoonists, thank goodness! It's like the brains of today's strip cartoonists melted into derivative pablum before they even left the starting gate. Strange; even the 'good' strips are barely worth reading. I think this is because the real cartoonists got into making their own comics. Jeff Smith turned down King Features, (or the other one) and just did it himself.
The generation of greats before Watterson included, in my opinion,
Ah, it's a giant conspiracy. I guess this conspiracy also works in other countries with the same issues? Take off your tinfoil hat and step up to the big table.
Poor people usually wind up group to gather in cheap areas. Start cutting program, and they are the first to feel it's immediate impact.
You do realize you are stating that poor were created as an excuse to get rid of the poor, right?
See how stupid it is.
Um. . , I think your older cousin (or whoever) will be rather miffed when he gets back and sees the nonsense you've been posting on his account.
While I can't claim to have read many of your posts with a close eye, I must say that this is by far the most drunken of them I've ever seen. So perhaps you should either sober up or start exercising password protection. Everything I posted is verifiable. Go spend a week doing some research rather than leaping to half-baked conclusions.
The entire culture is just ruined, the values, what these people think, are just a cancer on society and it has to be isolated and then ultimately cut out. You can't mandate dogs be good samaritans, you can only put them in concentration camps.
No, but you can take a viable culture and exercise class and economic warfare upon it so that its offspring are under-fed, ill-educated and socially reduced to the point where said society does indeed become a ghetto filled with people behaving like animals. Humans tend to do that when you starve and abuse them for long enough.
Then, once the poor have been cast into barbarism, people like you are invited to judge them unfit to exist and think the idea was all your own. Because in the long run, this was the goal at the outset, (the secret services were directly involved in this using in small-scale many of the same tactics used when creating banana republics or slave nations like Haiti), and now you are playing your role by jumping on the predetermined note. Your frustrations and anger, which while justifiable in the moment, were created by others through calculated efforts and are now being manipulated. When The Prince can successfully turn man against his brother, half the work of subjugation is already achieved.
For us, the problem comes to full bloom when we simply see the symptoms but fail to understand the disease.
Here's what I see: A desire to assert some sort of intellectual superiority by reducing others to automata, thereby justifying your perceived self worth as a "free thinker," when in reality it could be effectively argued that you're simply falling back on your own "automatic program" of taking each response != "validation" and categorizing it as an "automatic program," which, ironically, would both validate your claim AND demonstrate its irrelevance so long as each program is not identical, which appears to be the case.
I'm not a free thinker. Nobody is. And you're right; the ego is always eager to assert dominance. As much as I try to put it aside, it remains a force to be reckoned with. But it is a sliding scale; at the one extreme, a person can become a slave to the Ego, flying into a rage when challenged, while on the other hand s/he can laugh at and make an effort to disengage from the emotional spurts offered by the Ego thus minimizing its control. I once had it described to me thusly; think of the Ego as a bowling ball which is sitting in the middle of the lane. If you pretend it isn't there, it will screw up all your carefully intended strikes. If by contrast you recognize its presence and that it is not going away, you can try to bowl around it. -Not the best metaphor but workable.
The != "validation", as you put it, in this case was in fact a classic ridicule evasion/attack, a type which is well understood. As such, it seems to me entirely reasonable, unless you can add something I am not aware of, to think of it as exactly that.
We are all affected by our internal programming, but valid observation remains entirely possible. Accuracy is improved when multiple people work to bowl around their egos and point out errors and ego-traps and spot programs running in each other.
So what do you think? Was the poster making a joke for some other reason than the one I suggested?
let me be the first to say... what the hell are you talking about?
First of all, your question is a lie. You don't actually want to know what I'm talking about. Here's what I see:
You recognized a pattern which is out of keeping with the "official" mode of thinking, and the automatic program you come pre-installed with kicked into play. Some variant of herd-motivated ridicule.
When the program finished running, you felt better about yourself; secure in your membership in the herd. That warm, fuzzy hit of feeling of belonging is the reward for running the program. The program itself is a very simple, but otherwise clever little trap for those ensnared by it. It pushes those it is run against to stop thinking outside the official parameters while at the same time blocking awareness of whatever topic of thought or discussion first activated the program.
In order to implant the program, the subject needs to have been tormented as a child so that it A) recognizes and understands the dynamics of the social pecking order, and B) has had its self-confidence crushed through repeated attacks so that it remains dependent upon the herd for all of its personal validation and love.
This program is layer one; among the first and most basic hurdles which must be cleared in order to have even the smallest hope of waking up. Very, very few people are able to this. Until then, you are a robot, plain and simple.
That's what I'm talking about.
Aren't you glad you asked?;)
And don't worry. We all go through this. I'm not trying to hurt you.
Scientologists would say the same about the reactive mind.
Scientology is one of the premier examples of spiritual exploration gone horribly awry, co-opted by the very forces which seek to keep people locked down. Their trick is to take a bunch of good ideas and quietly interweave them with creeped-out insanity.
The New Age bookstores are filled to brimming with fail-safe nets designed to catch people who fall out of the matrix.
There IS a path, but it takes a lot of comparative study, source-checking and in the end, rolling up your pant leggings and getting out there yourself to figure out who the heck is on first.
Yeah, but your talk of "Ego" and "the soul" is all gobbledygook.
Well, I didn't mean to suggest that YOUR computer was coded by a genius or that your hardware wasn't found in a box of rejects from the late 80's. You'll have to forgive your maker if you can't keep up.
As for the soul. . . Well, that's not a winnable debate one way or the other, so your call of 'gobbledygook' is no more or less useful.
That being said, did you feel a stab of irritation upon completing the first sentence? The ego would have been the item making that particular sensation. Sorry. It was just a demonstration. No harm intended. I'm sure your wetware is fine.
Could this, perhaps, also be a little program running in your mind.
Sure. But how can one tell. . ?
The best I've been able to come up with is this. . .
-When the Ego engages or is heavily invested, I'm probably dealing with programming. -When Feeding engages, it's the same thing. (Energetic Feeding includes both bullying as well as actions taken to gain approval or attention.)
These things share a certain feeling which, over time, becomes recognizable within oneself. As far as I can determine, much of my behavior comes from one of these two places, largely connected to the automatic state of my being. Unless one is coming from a very pure place of altruism, the only way to not engage one of those two states, it seems to me, is to sit very still and do nothing.
Though, there is one other force. . .
Creativity. -This one is interesting; it comes from within and you act on an artistic impulse because it feels good, and this makes it selfish of course, however, it is not linked to taking away from others; there is no bullying or showing off involved, (until the output is shared.) This might be the closest that raw humans ever come to non-robotic behavior. Though the argument can be made that we are simply being played like instruments via manipulated feelings for the specific end of producing elements designed to affect and control society. Like directing certain of the cattle to behave in order to direct the entire herd.
Basically, after going around and around with this stuff, the best I've been able to come up with is that we can only observe our behavior and after a great deal of work, lean towards pure altruism without the hope of ever fully getting there. Of course, some of the really advanced spiritual practitioners are able to ascend to such a level, but grubs like me can do little more than watch and lean.
The soul, I think, builds up from repeated attempts to see and understand, to feel from other people's perspectives, to push into awareness in all the ways a soul can.
As I understand it, everything we learn and do can ultimately be condensed into one thing. Survival. Think about it, we are alive today because the core tenant of our existence hasn't been broken yet. We, as a species continue to survive. Different behaviors do nothing but aid or take a different path to maintaining this goal. Perhaps curiosity is nothing but an attempt to make our survival more efficient. Perhaps it's a luxury only suited for higher level organism. Who knows.
I think there's a great deal more going on. -Saying that Survival is the primary objective of Life is like saying that schools exist to make sure that enough students graduate to justify the yearly budget. It's a circular argument; if a school is successful, then it will justify its budget and thus every positive action the school took can be argued as having had the singular goal of continued survival. The idea of sharing and exploring knowledge needn't ever enter into the matter for the equation to balance and make sense.
And yet, we know that schools are more than just infernal continuance machines. They exist as a means of teaching growing awarenesses.
I see evolution as a natural by-product rather than the objective.
Of course curiosity can be programmed. What are humans if not big, fleshy, biological machines of sorts? Granted we do not work like computers do, but the underlying processes are still structured and computational--if the brain were chaotic it wouldn't work.
~waves hand~ Speak for yourself, Mister Roboto. ~/waves hand~
But seriously, this is a really fascinating question. Souls aren't handed out like candy. You have to build them through main force; by actively choosing to be aware from moment to moment. What I am finding to be the biggest challenge in that requires the supreme effort of recognizing one's own automatic nature and cleaning the gunk out of it.
Every time some subject comes up in conversation which makes me twitch or sweat or want to pull away, THAT indicates a piece of gunk. Each time I want to fall back and use a comfortable and proven behavior routine to deal with a given moment, THAT indicates a piece of gunk.
After one does enough work, you begin to see very clearly just how messy and automatic the people around you are. -These days, I find I am constantly aware of people's programs and little acts, why they work and what they are designed to do, and where people get stuck running those silly programs over and over day after day, year after year without ever stopping to ask, "What is the real me under this?". The soul is that part of us which is capable of recognizing the automatic nature of the brain and body and stepping in through an application of Will to interrupt the code execution.
It's difficult and the ego doesn't like it at all; Any suggestion that one is a robot is usually met with disgust and fear, if the accusation is even understood in the first place. The Ego is, I think, a foreign installment designed exactly to keep us from performing that self-examination. With the Ego in place and strong, there is no hope of breaking out of the cage of automatic behavior.
According the the UN, the amount of warfare in the world is on a slow-but-steady decline.
Interesting. Though, I wonder how one goes about measuring such a thing. Rounds fired? Humans killed? Money spent on weapons? Still, as bitter a joke as the UN is, that does sound like the sort of thing they would attempt to be earnest and accurate about. Sort of. . .
Though, I tend to define warfare as any large-scale deliberate attempt to subjugate and crush the human spirit. This extends to population control through every imaginable means. This whole economic collapse stands as a large part of that. Heck, the entire fiat money system is a part of that. Resource greed and disaster capitalism loom large on the crime list as well these days. Open shooting wars are certainly a big deal, but the big picture is. . , well, bigger.
I am almost 30 years old, during my lifetime there were no wars (in my country...), no major new Ideology like socialism, communism or facism was born, or grew strong and even the liberalization trends in society were thoroughly solid before I was even born. Sure, the internet, cloning, blablabla, all nice and dandy, but compared to the horrific political and social clash of ideologies in the past its almost like we reached a plateau.
I was contemplating this myself earlier this week; looking back over the last five hundred years, there has been a seemingly un-ending series of massive shake-ups, including the genocide of the Amerindians, numerous revolutions in Europe, a couple of world wars, the invention cars and planes and the telephone.
But the feeling that we've reached a plateau is a total illusion, promoted by our TV culture. --Which, in itself is a significant movement, though I don't think you can define it as 'political' per se, but as a socially defining force, it is easily on par with such experiments as the now old political ideologies in terms of scope and power. And TV is really new. At 30, you won't remember, but when I was a kid TVs were only just becoming ubiquitous and kids still played outside and worked their brains in a very different way than they do today. I can see the difference between TV kids and those who do are not plugged in, and it's night and day. That item by itself is a massive change, but due to the change itself, is nearly invisible unless one is paying attention.) Today, I can walk along a darkening street around Prime Time, and if I look up at an apartment building, I'll see 80% or more of the windows flickering Borg-blue light as all the people plug in for their daily dose of television "programming".
It's at moments like these that I realize we are right now living in a period of history which will be named and discussed intently in future history classes, (though, I doubt there will even be people to teach given the train wreck of our species currently in progress.)
It is my opinion that we live in hands-down the most interesting times which have come along in a few thousand years. Going from seven billion people to a couple million in short order is a pretty interesting event.
I bet you could get this thing to store images quite easily. (Well, with the right hardware design team and enough funding, I mean.)
But it seems that all you'd need is some manner of scanning a series of on/offs, technology which is very robust and all over the place. It would be basically a scaled up digital camera sensor; heck, you could probably use many of the same controller chips which have been developed over the last ten years.
The trick would be to hold back and not try to make it into an "everything" machine, (ie, a laptop). Sure, it would cost more than $30, but probably not much more. And if you rigged it so that power was only drained during a scan and write procedure, you could probably run it nicely on a couple of AA batteries for a good long while.
Now that would be a very interesting little device.
Wow. The current bid sits at US $4,250.00 with six unique bidders.
Somehow, based on the posts here, I don't think that number is going to increase as a result of exposure on Slashdot.
My highschool art teacher had a special scowl when he told us about the commonly heard phrase among the plebes, "I may not know anything about art, but I know what I like." I tended to think that this is one of the more sensible statements I'd ever heard, but then I didn't get stellar grades in art class. I wonder if he'd be up for a black cube of doom?
From the FAQ. ..
Q: If I were to buy this, how long could I expect to own it before it sells itself again? A: It is hard to say. Like any commodity it is subject to demand. It could be moments or years. The perpetual state of uncertainty and the instability of ownership are primary components of the work.
Hm. That's actually kind of neat. I can see the appeal for the art community. Nice jorb. --Though, for the rest of us, the same feeling can be achieved at discount simply by contemplating the EULA on a piece of software. You own the disk, but do you OWN the disk? The mind reels!
12 hours a day, 6 days a week is not that bad, that's 72 hours a week.
Yes and no. There are certainly worse situations, if that's what you mean, but I suspect you are talking from a more brainwashed perspective. When nearly all of the useful hours of your life are owed to somebody else, you have none left over for personal reflection and spiritual growth. (And by spiritual, I do not mean religious. Quite the opposite.) --But over-work is a great way to prevent people from thinking and becoming strong. It is a basic truism to state that, "Strong people are difficult to exploit." --And exploitation is big money.
In any case, super-long hours are often unnecessary; if earnings were disseminated equally among employees, more people could be hired and everybody's standard of living could go up. If things were managed in a sane, non-greedy manner.
Contrary to popular belief, this does not automatically lead to laziness and welfare economics. Hard work feels great, especially physical and manual hard work. I like it a lot. I have the luxury of choosing my work and my hours, and I simply find that I am happier when I'm working. But unless this is a chosen state of affairs, and unless it is balanced with healthy amounts down-time, then it can quickly turn into a form of indentured service; slavery.
But it's hard to contemplate such things when you're hacking away at a job and then return home to eat, watch TV, sleep and then go again.
Also. . . if you are speaking from personal experience wrt girlfriends, I hear you. I've had both good SO's and difficult ones. The good ones step up when they see the person they love being hurt rather than doing so out of a sense of selfish ownership. It's pretty clear which is which when you spend enough time with somebody. And like a crappy job, I recommend people suck up the courage and get out of crappy relationships.
You are mistaken. Biofuels do indeed come from thin air. CO2 (from thin air) + H20 + sunshine = biofuel The bulk of the mass in biofuel, just like the bulk of the mass in all plants and animals, indeed originates from thin air. True fact.
You're deliberately mis-interpreting me in order to argue your point. Please don't do that. It makes you look like an ass and you can serve your ends better.
Yes, the biological world is one big sunlight battery. But that doesn't mean we are using this reality wisely or smartly. Algae farming can work, but it isn't efficient enough yet to compete with crude oil or other biofuel systems in terms of energy-in/energy-out. The paper suggests, (if the article is reporting correctly), a number of methods to address this. From what I gather, it wasn't against the idea but was simply a summation of the situation as it currently stands. But I'd like to know myself, so yes, I WOULD like to read the paper despite your meager assurances that I only need to read your snide little post in order to obtain all the information I need.
Gotta love the scientific publishing industry; I wonder if the authors see a thin dime from the publication of their research. . ?
Anyway, given what I've read regarding the fledgling 'Algae as Fuel' industry, I'm inclined to agree with the reported conclusions of the pooh pooh paper. One company I looked at last year, (after one dug through their shiny spin and investor brochure fluff), was that they used wood chips to feed their algae. Biofuels don't just come from thin air; they needed sugars.
Now, when you're running a demonstration model plant with a very small output, then woodchips are great; there's plenty of waste biomass available. But when you scale up for mass production, suddenly you're having to make some pretty severe choices. The point of the paper was that nobody had come up yet with a sensible solution to Algae-based fuel production which would not place a bigger energy 'footprint' on the land than other forms of biofuel production. And that's saying something given that other biofuels are kind of insane at the moment.
But it sure would be nice to be able to read the paper myself. So long as we're going to stay stuck in a burning-stuff-to-make-wheels-go-round culture, then Algae seems to offer some significant benefits if you can get it up and running efficiently.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. You missed my key point.
There are many many normal kids who don't need to resist and never get bullied in the first place.
I'm telling you how to be THAT guy.
I understood your "key" point perfectly. That's because it's the same "key" point the article was making. The reason everybody is griping about that "key" point is due to it's being 100% wrong. I was making an effort to explain why this is the case, but it doesn't look like you're going to get it.
Don't worry. Some people simply don't see in color.
-FL
I'd be very surprised if this technology doesn't already exist.
Richard Dolan speaks here about what he terms the, "Break Away Civilization".
The idea being that black budget technology is so advanced, has been growing of its own accord for so long, and is so impossible to reveal given its nature, the result is that people working within its structure are essentially no longer dealing with the same reality as the rest of us. The slaves get sticks and fire while the master of the house gets to use the current technology. The only difference here being that the slaves don't even get to see the technology made possible by their sweat and bondage.
-FL
Damn.
At 3:30 on that video. . , I think I just saw the future.
The laptop and the netbook I picked up last Summer, and even the PC's I've been running over the past few years are all about to fall into the same category as my Dad's old stereo system. -Where the shape and weight of a given device will no longer be determined by space requirements of the technology packed inside. Every square inch inside my Dad's old amplifier was strategically taken up with vacuum tube electronics whereas the modern gear I could buy as a teenager was mostly empty space inside sleek plastic boxes with big shiny knobs. Empty calories.
Which probably means that it won't be long before netbooks and laptops are craptastic princess-pink or G.I. Joe themed items complete with dirty finger prints available at garage sales or brand new clattering around in the calculator section at the local Office Depot. The laptop you are using right now, while it is (most likely) a humming, energy hungry heat monster, will nonetheless ooze solid-state build quality and a healthy heft when compared to the next generation of light-as-air junk tech.
And when I think about it. . .
A lot of super-popular electronic media technology has come and gone over the last thirty years. Tape decks? Gone. Portable CD players? Gone. VCR's? Gone. The humble telephone? Changed beyond recognition. Here's a quiz: What's the one piece of technology which has stayed the same throughout that whole period?
That's right! Headphones and the 1/8" audio jack. Apparently we've arrived at perfection with audio gear. Everything else has changed.
I wonder what the final expression of the video display will end up being. . .
-FL
I>Time flies when having fun, and as one gets older, one is allowed to do more fun things.
By this logic, everything should be reversed; most people have a lot more fun when they're kids, and as you point out, more responsibility (thus, drudgery) as adults. Time should be practically crawling uphill by the time we're in our 30's.
Of course, I know you're joking, but actually. . .
-FL
However if you feel good about yourself, and you feel that you're valuable just because you're a human being, you then will be able to treat others with the greatest true respect. They will pick up on that. They will love how it feels and they will WANT to be your friend.
This is great, but it only works when everybody is built the same way.
Fundamental, biological fact: Psychopaths exist and it is impossible for them to respond to love. In fact, telling people, when abused, to simply amp up the love they broadcast is a wonderful thing for the psychopath. They'll happily gobble up whatever you give them and then kick you some more. It is my personal belief that the whole Christ dying on a cross thing was a deliberate and false bit of social programming designed to make feeding easier. "Turn the other cheek" is a great thing for all the sheep to have hard-wired into their brains - if you are a psychopath. The only way to deal with a psychopath is to recognize the traits and RESIST them. It's not that difficult. It's shark hunting; sharks always respond according to their own behavior and thus they can be predicted and mapped, but first you have to educate yourself and not pretend yourself into danger by saying such comforting things as, "Everybody just needs love!" Not every human is really human.
It is estimated that about 6% of the global population is psychopathic. That's 1 in approximately 16 people. --And it stands to reason that power centers, companies, cities and entire countries which promote and reward self-serving and abusive behavior are going to attract psychopathic individuals. It is safe to assume that the concentrations of psychopaths will be much higher than 6% in some areas. And even if that isn't the case, the spread of cruel-assholes throughout my old school dayss was easily around 1 in 16.
-FL
"I will immediately after the election move to repeal the law retrospectively."
Promises, promises. . .
-FL
May I please have a Pixar animated film adaptation of Calvin and Hobbes?
I think when people go to Hell, that's the in-flight movie.
-FL
I'd also mention Lynn Johnston, (For Better or For Worse) and more recently, Scott Adams, (Dilbert).
Jim Davis DID rock the world, but he made that mistake Watterson talked about. He didn't know when to quit. He became a vulgar reminder.
And those four guys were also from a specific era; the one which flourished at the final height of the Newspaper Strip. Those heights will never be reached again, (and looking at the fare offered by the current team of cartoonists, thank goodness! It's like the brains of today's strip cartoonists melted into derivative pablum before they even left the starting gate. Strange; even the 'good' strips are barely worth reading. I think this is because the real cartoonists got into making their own comics. Jeff Smith turned down King Features, (or the other one) and just did it himself.
The generation of greats before Watterson included, in my opinion,
1) Charles M. Schulz
2) Walt Kelly
Just my opinion.
-FL
Ah, it's a giant conspiracy. I guess this conspiracy also works in other countries with the same issues? Take off your tinfoil hat and step up to the big table.
Poor people usually wind up group to gather in cheap areas. Start cutting program, and they are the first to feel it's immediate impact.
You do realize you are stating that poor were created as an excuse to get rid of the poor, right?
See how stupid it is.
Um. . , I think your older cousin (or whoever) will be rather miffed when he gets back and sees the nonsense you've been posting on his account.
While I can't claim to have read many of your posts with a close eye, I must say that this is by far the most drunken of them I've ever seen. So perhaps you should either sober up or start exercising password protection. Everything I posted is verifiable. Go spend a week doing some research rather than leaping to half-baked conclusions.
Bye now.
-FL
The entire culture is just ruined, the values, what these people think, are just a cancer on society and it has to be isolated and then ultimately cut out. You can't mandate dogs be good samaritans, you can only put them in concentration camps.
No, but you can take a viable culture and exercise class and economic warfare upon it so that its offspring are under-fed, ill-educated and socially reduced to the point where said society does indeed become a ghetto filled with people behaving like animals. Humans tend to do that when you starve and abuse them for long enough.
Then, once the poor have been cast into barbarism, people like you are invited to judge them unfit to exist and think the idea was all your own. Because in the long run, this was the goal at the outset, (the secret services were directly involved in this using in small-scale many of the same tactics used when creating banana republics or slave nations like Haiti), and now you are playing your role by jumping on the predetermined note. Your frustrations and anger, which while justifiable in the moment, were created by others through calculated efforts and are now being manipulated. When The Prince can successfully turn man against his brother, half the work of subjugation is already achieved.
For us, the problem comes to full bloom when we simply see the symptoms but fail to understand the disease.
-FL
Here's what I see: A desire to assert some sort of intellectual superiority by reducing others to automata, thereby justifying your perceived self worth as a "free thinker," when in reality it could be effectively argued that you're simply falling back on your own "automatic program" of taking each response != "validation" and categorizing it as an "automatic program," which, ironically, would both validate your claim AND demonstrate its irrelevance so long as each program is not identical, which appears to be the case.
I'm not a free thinker. Nobody is. And you're right; the ego is always eager to assert dominance. As much as I try to put it aside, it remains a force to be reckoned with. But it is a sliding scale; at the one extreme, a person can become a slave to the Ego, flying into a rage when challenged, while on the other hand s/he can laugh at and make an effort to disengage from the emotional spurts offered by the Ego thus minimizing its control. I once had it described to me thusly; think of the Ego as a bowling ball which is sitting in the middle of the lane. If you pretend it isn't there, it will screw up all your carefully intended strikes. If by contrast you recognize its presence and that it is not going away, you can try to bowl around it. -Not the best metaphor but workable.
The != "validation", as you put it, in this case was in fact a classic ridicule evasion/attack, a type which is well understood. As such, it seems to me entirely reasonable, unless you can add something I am not aware of, to think of it as exactly that.
We are all affected by our internal programming, but valid observation remains entirely possible. Accuracy is improved when multiple people work to bowl around their egos and point out errors and ego-traps and spot programs running in each other.
So what do you think? Was the poster making a joke for some other reason than the one I suggested?
-FL
let me be the first to say... what the hell are you talking about?
First of all, your question is a lie. You don't actually want to know what I'm talking about. Here's what I see:
You recognized a pattern which is out of keeping with the "official" mode of thinking, and the automatic program you come pre-installed with kicked into play. Some variant of herd-motivated ridicule.
When the program finished running, you felt better about yourself; secure in your membership in the herd. That warm, fuzzy hit of feeling of belonging is the reward for running the program. The program itself is a very simple, but otherwise clever little trap for those ensnared by it. It pushes those it is run against to stop thinking outside the official parameters while at the same time blocking awareness of whatever topic of thought or discussion first activated the program.
In order to implant the program, the subject needs to have been tormented as a child so that it A) recognizes and understands the dynamics of the social pecking order, and B) has had its self-confidence crushed through repeated attacks so that it remains dependent upon the herd for all of its personal validation and love.
This program is layer one; among the first and most basic hurdles which must be cleared in order to have even the smallest hope of waking up. Very, very few people are able to this. Until then, you are a robot, plain and simple.
That's what I'm talking about.
Aren't you glad you asked? ;)
And don't worry. We all go through this. I'm not trying to hurt you.
-FL
Scientologists would say the same about the reactive mind.
Scientology is one of the premier examples of spiritual exploration gone horribly awry, co-opted by the very forces which seek to keep people locked down. Their trick is to take a bunch of good ideas and quietly interweave them with creeped-out insanity.
The New Age bookstores are filled to brimming with fail-safe nets designed to catch people who fall out of the matrix.
There IS a path, but it takes a lot of comparative study, source-checking and in the end, rolling up your pant leggings and getting out there yourself to figure out who the heck is on first.
-FL
Yeah, but your talk of "Ego" and "the soul" is all gobbledygook.
Well, I didn't mean to suggest that YOUR computer was coded by a genius or that your hardware wasn't found in a box of rejects from the late 80's. You'll have to forgive your maker if you can't keep up.
As for the soul. . . Well, that's not a winnable debate one way or the other, so your call of 'gobbledygook' is no more or less useful.
That being said, did you feel a stab of irritation upon completing the first sentence? The ego would have been the item making that particular sensation. Sorry. It was just a demonstration. No harm intended. I'm sure your wetware is fine.
-FL
Could this, perhaps, also be a little program running in your mind.
Sure. But how can one tell. . ?
The best I've been able to come up with is this. . .
-When the Ego engages or is heavily invested, I'm probably dealing with programming.
-When Feeding engages, it's the same thing. (Energetic Feeding includes both bullying as well as actions taken to gain approval or attention.)
These things share a certain feeling which, over time, becomes recognizable within oneself. As far as I can determine, much of my behavior comes from one of these two places, largely connected to the automatic state of my being. Unless one is coming from a very pure place of altruism, the only way to not engage one of those two states, it seems to me, is to sit very still and do nothing.
Though, there is one other force. . .
Creativity. -This one is interesting; it comes from within and you act on an artistic impulse because it feels good, and this makes it selfish of course, however, it is not linked to taking away from others; there is no bullying or showing off involved, (until the output is shared.) This might be the closest that raw humans ever come to non-robotic behavior. Though the argument can be made that we are simply being played like instruments via manipulated feelings for the specific end of producing elements designed to affect and control society. Like directing certain of the cattle to behave in order to direct the entire herd.
Basically, after going around and around with this stuff, the best I've been able to come up with is that we can only observe our behavior and after a great deal of work, lean towards pure altruism without the hope of ever fully getting there. Of course, some of the really advanced spiritual practitioners are able to ascend to such a level, but grubs like me can do little more than watch and lean.
The soul, I think, builds up from repeated attempts to see and understand, to feel from other people's perspectives, to push into awareness in all the ways a soul can.
-FL
As I understand it, everything we learn and do can ultimately be condensed into one thing. Survival. Think about it, we are alive today because the core tenant of our existence hasn't been broken yet. We, as a species continue to survive. Different behaviors do nothing but aid or take a different path to maintaining this goal. Perhaps curiosity is nothing but an attempt to make our survival more efficient. Perhaps it's a luxury only suited for higher level organism. Who knows.
I think there's a great deal more going on. -Saying that Survival is the primary objective of Life is like saying that schools exist to make sure that enough students graduate to justify the yearly budget. It's a circular argument; if a school is successful, then it will justify its budget and thus every positive action the school took can be argued as having had the singular goal of continued survival. The idea of sharing and exploring knowledge needn't ever enter into the matter for the equation to balance and make sense.
And yet, we know that schools are more than just infernal continuance machines. They exist as a means of teaching growing awarenesses.
I see evolution as a natural by-product rather than the objective.
-FL
Of course curiosity can be programmed. What are humans if not big, fleshy, biological machines of sorts? Granted we do not work like computers do, but the underlying processes are still structured and computational--if the brain were chaotic it wouldn't work.
~waves hand~ Speak for yourself, Mister Roboto. ~/waves hand~
But seriously, this is a really fascinating question. Souls aren't handed out like candy. You have to build them through main force; by actively choosing to be aware from moment to moment. What I am finding to be the biggest challenge in that requires the supreme effort of recognizing one's own automatic nature and cleaning the gunk out of it.
Every time some subject comes up in conversation which makes me twitch or sweat or want to pull away, THAT indicates a piece of gunk. Each time I want to fall back and use a comfortable and proven behavior routine to deal with a given moment, THAT indicates a piece of gunk.
After one does enough work, you begin to see very clearly just how messy and automatic the people around you are. -These days, I find I am constantly aware of people's programs and little acts, why they work and what they are designed to do, and where people get stuck running those silly programs over and over day after day, year after year without ever stopping to ask, "What is the real me under this?". The soul is that part of us which is capable of recognizing the automatic nature of the brain and body and stepping in through an application of Will to interrupt the code execution.
It's difficult and the ego doesn't like it at all; Any suggestion that one is a robot is usually met with disgust and fear, if the accusation is even understood in the first place. The Ego is, I think, a foreign installment designed exactly to keep us from performing that self-examination. With the Ego in place and strong, there is no hope of breaking out of the cage of automatic behavior.
Like I said, a fascinating topic.
-FL
According the the UN, the amount of warfare in the world is on a slow-but-steady decline.
Interesting. Though, I wonder how one goes about measuring such a thing. Rounds fired? Humans killed? Money spent on weapons? Still, as bitter a joke as the UN is, that does sound like the sort of thing they would attempt to be earnest and accurate about. Sort of. . .
Though, I tend to define warfare as any large-scale deliberate attempt to subjugate and crush the human spirit. This extends to population control through every imaginable means. This whole economic collapse stands as a large part of that. Heck, the entire fiat money system is a part of that. Resource greed and disaster capitalism loom large on the crime list as well these days. Open shooting wars are certainly a big deal, but the big picture is. . , well, bigger.
-FL
I am almost 30 years old, during my lifetime there were no wars (in my country...), no major new Ideology like socialism, communism or facism was born, or grew strong and even the liberalization trends in society were thoroughly solid before I was even born. Sure, the internet, cloning, blablabla, all nice and dandy, but compared to the horrific political and social clash of ideologies in the past its almost like we reached a plateau.
I was contemplating this myself earlier this week; looking back over the last five hundred years, there has been a seemingly un-ending series of massive shake-ups, including the genocide of the Amerindians, numerous revolutions in Europe, a couple of world wars, the invention cars and planes and the telephone.
But the feeling that we've reached a plateau is a total illusion, promoted by our TV culture. --Which, in itself is a significant movement, though I don't think you can define it as 'political' per se, but as a socially defining force, it is easily on par with such experiments as the now old political ideologies in terms of scope and power. And TV is really new. At 30, you won't remember, but when I was a kid TVs were only just becoming ubiquitous and kids still played outside and worked their brains in a very different way than they do today. I can see the difference between TV kids and those who do are not plugged in, and it's night and day. That item by itself is a massive change, but due to the change itself, is nearly invisible unless one is paying attention.) Today, I can walk along a darkening street around Prime Time, and if I look up at an apartment building, I'll see 80% or more of the windows flickering Borg-blue light as all the people plug in for their daily dose of television "programming".
It's at moments like these that I realize we are right now living in a period of history which will be named and discussed intently in future history classes, (though, I doubt there will even be people to teach given the train wreck of our species currently in progress.)
It is my opinion that we live in hands-down the most interesting times which have come along in a few thousand years. Going from seven billion people to a couple million in short order is a pretty interesting event.
-And if you're interested in political things, then the decision in the US last week to allow corporations freedom of speech wrt political campaign support is enough to make your head spin.
Just my opinion.
-FL
I bet you could get this thing to store images quite easily. (Well, with the right hardware design team and enough funding, I mean.)
But it seems that all you'd need is some manner of scanning a series of on/offs, technology which is very robust and all over the place. It would be basically a scaled up digital camera sensor; heck, you could probably use many of the same controller chips which have been developed over the last ten years.
The trick would be to hold back and not try to make it into an "everything" machine, (ie, a laptop). Sure, it would cost more than $30, but probably not much more. And if you rigged it so that power was only drained during a scan and write procedure, you could probably run it nicely on a couple of AA batteries for a good long while.
Now that would be a very interesting little device.
-FL
Wow. The current bid sits at US $4,250.00 with six unique bidders.
Somehow, based on the posts here, I don't think that number is going to increase as a result of exposure on Slashdot.
My highschool art teacher had a special scowl when he told us about the commonly heard phrase among the plebes, "I may not know anything about art, but I know what I like." I tended to think that this is one of the more sensible statements I'd ever heard, but then I didn't get stellar grades in art class. I wonder if he'd be up for a black cube of doom?
From the FAQ. . .
Hm. That's actually kind of neat. I can see the appeal for the art community. Nice jorb. --Though, for the rest of us, the same feeling can be achieved at discount simply by contemplating the EULA on a piece of software. You own the disk, but do you OWN the disk? The mind reels!
Now THAT's art!
-FL
GoogleCash also needs to follow under the same rules as PayPal. However I am yet to hear of this type of case from GoogleCash as I do with Paypal.
All valid points, but I just wanted to quickly add that Googlecash is not affiliated with Google. Seems scammy to me.
-FL
12 hours a day, 6 days a week is not that bad, that's 72 hours a week.
Yes and no. There are certainly worse situations, if that's what you mean, but I suspect you are talking from a more brainwashed perspective. When nearly all of the useful hours of your life are owed to somebody else, you have none left over for personal reflection and spiritual growth. (And by spiritual, I do not mean religious. Quite the opposite.) --But over-work is a great way to prevent people from thinking and becoming strong. It is a basic truism to state that, "Strong people are difficult to exploit." --And exploitation is big money.
In any case, super-long hours are often unnecessary; if earnings were disseminated equally among employees, more people could be hired and everybody's standard of living could go up. If things were managed in a sane, non-greedy manner.
Contrary to popular belief, this does not automatically lead to laziness and welfare economics. Hard work feels great, especially physical and manual hard work. I like it a lot. I have the luxury of choosing my work and my hours, and I simply find that I am happier when I'm working. But unless this is a chosen state of affairs, and unless it is balanced with healthy amounts down-time, then it can quickly turn into a form of indentured service; slavery.
But it's hard to contemplate such things when you're hacking away at a job and then return home to eat, watch TV, sleep and then go again.
Also. . . if you are speaking from personal experience wrt girlfriends, I hear you. I've had both good SO's and difficult ones. The good ones step up when they see the person they love being hurt rather than doing so out of a sense of selfish ownership. It's pretty clear which is which when you spend enough time with somebody. And like a crappy job, I recommend people suck up the courage and get out of crappy relationships.
-Cheers!
-FL
You are mistaken. Biofuels do indeed come from thin air.
CO2 (from thin air) + H20 + sunshine = biofuel
The bulk of the mass in biofuel, just like the bulk of the mass in all plants and animals, indeed originates from thin air.
True fact.
You're deliberately mis-interpreting me in order to argue your point. Please don't do that. It makes you look like an ass and you can serve your ends better.
Yes, the biological world is one big sunlight battery. But that doesn't mean we are using this reality wisely or smartly. Algae farming can work, but it isn't efficient enough yet to compete with crude oil or other biofuel systems in terms of energy-in/energy-out. The paper suggests, (if the article is reporting correctly), a number of methods to address this. From what I gather, it wasn't against the idea but was simply a summation of the situation as it currently stands. But I'd like to know myself, so yes, I WOULD like to read the paper despite your meager assurances that I only need to read your snide little post in order to obtain all the information I need.
-FL
Gotta love the scientific publishing industry; I wonder if the authors see a thin dime from the publication of their research. . ?
Anyway, given what I've read regarding the fledgling 'Algae as Fuel' industry, I'm inclined to agree with the reported conclusions of the pooh pooh paper. One company I looked at last year, (after one dug through their shiny spin and investor brochure fluff), was that they used wood chips to feed their algae. Biofuels don't just come from thin air; they needed sugars.
Now, when you're running a demonstration model plant with a very small output, then woodchips are great; there's plenty of waste biomass available. But when you scale up for mass production, suddenly you're having to make some pretty severe choices. The point of the paper was that nobody had come up yet with a sensible solution to Algae-based fuel production which would not place a bigger energy 'footprint' on the land than other forms of biofuel production. And that's saying something given that other biofuels are kind of insane at the moment.
But it sure would be nice to be able to read the paper myself. So long as we're going to stay stuck in a burning-stuff-to-make-wheels-go-round culture, then Algae seems to offer some significant benefits if you can get it up and running efficiently.
-FL