I'm annoyed that I need a Facebook account just to receive what we used to call, "Email".
The advantage I see is that open messages can turn into impromptu, albeit simple discussion forums with built-in photo catalogs. This can be more useful than email for some jobs.
But that's not what it's all about, as Farmville indicates. I think Facebook touches some kind of primal-tribal-pack-animal nerve. Farmville itself might represent more than just a dumb game with an addictive tamagachi edge. It might be a subconscious response to the fact that our food supply is precarious and stupid and that survival might fairly soon depend upon being able to raise chickens and grow potatoes in your back yard.
My heart bleeds regularly, and I haven't trusted the veracity of the scientific community in forever. In fact, the two conditions are a direct result of one another.
My rule of thumb is this. . .
"If evil can gain from lying, then you can rest assured that the popular media view is faulty."
Also. . .
"There is an inverse ratio between the monetary value of a lie and the veracity of its claim."
If (true) instinct tells you this was the best course, then it probably was.
Teachers with genuinely good stuff between their ears are a very valuable commodity. I don't know what I would have done without the couple of awesome teachers I had while growing up. Kept me from being crushed by the system and encouraged unconventional thinking. I'm a happy man today partly because of good teachers who weren't just system-bots but actually understood what it meant to be human.
Let's take a look at what one of the more lucid channeled sources has to say on the matter. (Why not? We're already off the reservation with this manuscript.)
Q: (L) Well, that settled that! Let me ask a couple of quick questions for my kid. She wants to know the source of the Voynich Manuscript. A: Disinformation. Q: (L) Who put it together? A: Various sources. Q: (L) Why? A: Monetary gain. Q: (L) So, somebody just faked up an ancient manuscript to sell it for big bucks? A: Yes. Q: (T) Well, they did it with the Hitler diaries. (L) Her next question is: how are some people able to walk on fiery coals, pierce their bodies all over, or lie on a bed of nails without pain or permanent physical disfigurement. A: Mentalism. Q: (L) What causes some planes, people and ships to disappear in the Bermuda Triangle? Where do they go and what happens to them? A: Already covered this.
To start off, an expression which anyone that thinks about science should constantly keep in mind: "Data is not the plural form of anecdote". You created some sort of correlation between blood types and human physiological differences based on a single case!
Well, actually I wasn't trying to make any sort of formal argument. I was pointing out that in the cases of me and my old room mate, we happened to fit into larger patterns observed across Japanese culture. Does it mean anything? I don't know. As I said, I know next to nothing about any of this and my own evidence is purely anecdotal. I even said as much. --Though, your comment fits with my other observation; that of a curious level of over-reaction.
The presence of a shared allele only means that somewhere in the genealogy, those two individuals shared a common ancestor that carried that exact allele. However, all the other genes in the genome of the two individuals could be completely different
True, there is a diffusive force in play over time as humans procreate, but how diffusive is the question when it comes to what ends up being expressed and how likely that expression is to occur across a population sample. It's largely a game of averages, but my immediate impression is that the averages might well fall in favor of there being larger patterns people can benefit from knowing about. In any case, the common personality traits noted in the blood types seem to hold true for me. --And now that I think of it, they also seem to hold for the handful of other type O's I know of, though I've only ever explored blood-type in relation to diet. Have you ever stopped eating red meat for an extended period of several weeks at a time? Might be worth running a few dietary experiments to see what makes you feel better or worse.
Blood type, whether you like it or not, appears to be a valid and useful bit of information to have at hand when working out what sort of diet works best for a given individual. I honestly doubt it is a hard and fast rule for everybody; human bodies are incredibly complex things with so many variables, but it's foolish to reject it out of hand simply because it offends some sort of value which appears to be more aesthetic than rational in geek code.
As for personality types. . , based on the ways genetic dispersion behaves in mixed populations, there seem to be logical grounds for further exploration of the idea. By contrast, the sceptical desire to shut off ALL thinking on the subject with extreme prejudice is simply not cool. Prejudice is silly.
For now, I appear to have an interesting piece of diagnostic information at my disposal which I am going to keep in mind as I continue to measure the world around me. Right now it doesn't hold much weight to me because I've only looked seriously at a couple of cases in hindsight, but if over time the correlations stack up, I'll give it more weight accordingly. If it turns out after enough information collection to be bunk, then I'll ditch it. Simple as that, and yet this is a terrifying system of learning for many people, especially geeks.
I think the reason this approach is so very offensive to so many geeks is that we, (cuz I am also a geek), have been taught to connect our self-worth to the validity of the ideas we think. We have been taught to feel shame for being mistaken about anything. This is a real tragedy, because the only way to learn anything directly is to explore openly and to wear different hats. This will naturally lead to following false ideas now and again. Until one is cool with being wrong, and sadly, being judged and laughed at, one will only ever be able to parrot officially sanctioned information and never know anything of value through direct exposure. It's like only ever reading about color or music.
I stopped being scared of ridicule a long time ago. I highly recommend it!
People look uncomfortable because *you're* full of shit. Sceptic means exactly the same as skeptic. Septic is the spelling that refers to a tank for holding sewage.
Oh dear! Touched a nerve, did we?
The spelling depends on which dictionary you happen to be reading from. For some reason which I find curious, dictionary instances of the double spelling are much more difficult to find on-line than they were only a few years ago. Though I distinctly remember seeing the alternative spelling in dictionaries when I was a kid, they appear to no longer be available today. But I am clearly not the only one who remembers growing up with this alternative spelling being part of our basic reality. Others in the medical profession use the term frequently. Despite the difficulty presented by Google's auto-spell correcting filters which might even have something to do with this retroactive editing of a whole word, there are plenty of examples of people using the alternative spelling. Doctors and scientists and journalists and such. ..
here. .. Exploding the albumin myth by M.M. Tjoeng; A.K.M. Bartelink; L.G. Thijs (pp. 17-20). In this article arguments are given to stop the current practise of infusing albumin in patients in shock and low levels of serum albumin. Correcting the albumin levels is not correlated with better survival or change in morbidity. Fluid therapy including the use of synthetic plasma expanders is the accepted therapy for patients in sceptic shock.
and here 9. SAVU L., ZOUAGHI H., CARLI A., and NUNEZ E., 1981 Serum depletion of cortisolsteroid binding-activities, an early marker of human sceptic shock. Biochem. Biophys. Res. Comm., 102, 411-419
and here If the bacteria get into the bloodstream they can cause septicaemia, sceptic shock and pneumonia. Infection can be fatal.
and here The pope's condition was 'very serious' after deteriorating dramatically following the heart attack, sceptic shock and a urinary tract infection, the Vatican announced early Friday, but by midday he had rallied somewhat and his condition was reported to be 'stable'.
and here Additionally the programme will also cover the issues surrounding community versus hospital acquired infection and include a session focussing specifically on sepsis and sceptic shock.
and here But the next day after vomiting several times, Mrs McCarthy was readmitted to the hospitals A&E department where doctors diagnosed sceptic shock.
and here (Dr Langley) I believe that priority areas should be those research fields where procedures of the greatest severity are conducted on animals, and those fields which use the largest numbers of animals. I would select two particular main areas: one is fundamental medical research. I would say that is a priority target, because it accounts for one-third of all animal procedures and includes experiments of substantial severity for animals, especially in the development of models of human conditions, such as diabetes, sceptic shock, cancer, and liver and kidney failure.
and here I was developing sceptic shock and I couldn't get through to anyone on the phone. I had to give myself an intramuscular injection of antibiotics.
and here As an example, when Celltech announced the failure of its
One of my ex-girlfriends had this gorgeous Underwood typewriter which she was given as a gift and she displays in her livingroom. It has a nice aesthetic quality which engages the imagination. --If it had been owned by a famous writer from its age, then it would send thrill-chills down my spine just being near it. --Imagine Mark Twain's fountain pen (or whatever he used) on your desk.
Perhaps when enough time has passed that computers and keyboards are irrelevant, out-moded technology, where few enough still exist that they are museum pieces from a past age, then I imagine they will hold a similar aesthetic quality for people. Especially if you happened to own one which belonged to a famous, culture-shaping individual.
But I suspect we'll have to wait another century or so before we know who will be remembered and revered and who will be lost in time.
Roddenberry? Maybe. I'd place my bets on Charles Schultz and Bill Waterson more than I do on Neal Stephenson. -George Lucas, too, if he'd had the good grace to die before Phantom Menace. (Sorry, George, but it's true.)
I don't know much about this blood type thing, but a cursory look suggests that the foundation holds some logic.
The blood types, like any difference owed to evolutionary forces, have roots which can be traced with relative ease across anthropological history.
For instance, type O's owe their genetic origins to hunter-gatherers; they thrive on foods available to such cultures, i.e., red meat and complex animal fats whereas they are not primed for efficient digestion and use of grains and similar plant materials. I know this from direct experience; I lived in a vegetarian household and gave up meat for the years that I was there. I turned into a pasty zombie and had head-aches all the time. Whereas one of the other guys living in the same place somehow managed, on essentially the same diet, to maintain a robust and healthy body. When I moved out and started eating meat again, literally within a couple of days, suddenly had color in my face again and felt strength flow back through me. It was like I'd woken up. Out of interest, we compared blood types, and sure enough, his was one of those which thrives on grains and plants and doesn't do well at all with meats. I turned out to be a type-O, and so the opposite is true for me in terms of diet. In any case, this isn't contested science.
Now how might this affect personality. . ?
Well, sheesh, I'm no anthropologist but I can certainly follow the logic wherein evolutionary genetics would favor those individuals who are successful on the hunt and filter out those characteristics which make for unsuccessful hunters of red meat. Further, brain chemistry and hormone balances are a huge part of the whole human equation, much of which is controlled through genetics. --And as brain chemistry and hormone balances make a huge impact upon behavior, I can easily see how generalized behavior patterns across populations might group with differing blood type on a Venn diagram.
I'm not saying that I know this for certain; I'd have to study it more closely to get a better idea, but the logic appears reasonable on the surface, and my own personality lines up with the claims. So based on this, my reaction is not that of the post author who without any examples lays down accusations of pseudo-science and calls for "Something" to be done about it. Sounds like a spooky bit of witch-hunting to me.
Now I can see how pop culture can take an idea like blood-type personality reading and spin it out of control into ridiculous places, but all in all, there is a lot more logic based on accepted science here than one can find with Astrology for instance, and yet the knee-jerk sceptics are reacting as though they've been stung. --Now THAT reaction is something I find worthy of investigation. What is it that the sceptics are so afraid of here that they are willing to act before thinking whilst supposedly championing the tenants of science?
There needs to be a word for "sceptics" of that nature. Personally, I like the fact that the word can be spelled in two ways; with a "C" and with a "K". --And that "Sceptic" when pronounced with a soft "c" refers to sewage. But for some reason people look uncomfortable when I bring that up. Probably in the same way those emu glance across the veldt at the lions. (Sorry. Couldn't resist.;-)
I find this particular flavor of insanity both sickly-disturbing and somewhat fascinating. That it happens to come from Frank Zappa doesn't validate it for me. He's just a creep who happened to get some spotlight.
I've seen this kind of disjointed writing style appear throughout the cult/conspiracy/fringe-science field and whenever it appears, there seem to be certain features which remain common between each example. That is, it appears to be evidence of a very specific kind of mind problem.
Anyway, it just struck me now that this type of personality would make a great tool in sculpting public awareness. --As I said, there is something very disturbing about this type of writing. It creates, in me anyway, a deep and strong emotional response. I just want to get the hell away from whoever is acting this way. It's clearly an automatic response, probably linked to some sort of disease avoidance. I don't want to catch whatever the heck is wrong with the person writing this way. --And I'd be surprised if this kind of response isn't common among most healthy people.
When grape farmers want to stop birds from destroying their crops, they employ a variety of different deterrents. Everything from scare-crows propane noise cannons called, "Bird Bangers". --Well, anyway, one system which is used employs speakers and the recorded sound of a dying crow. This apparently plays upon an aspect of avian psychology; when birds hear one of their kind howling in pain, they stay away. Human beings, animals that we are, are similarly wired with these deep and ancient response mechanisms. And when it comes to human manipulation, it is a very safe bet that somebody, somewhere with vast resources has probably not only considered every facet of the question, "How to manipulate populations", but has also come up with practical systems employing what they have learned. That is, if I can think it up on my free time, then somebody with a great deal more paid time and resources has very likely gotten there first and is actively using it.
A few damaged humans prodded into the right fields would certainly act as a psychological deterrent to other humans. Or in the case of Zappa and similar, used to pull listeners into darkness. (A great way to subvert the Hippie movement.)
This is one of those things where I've been sort of blinking to myself ever since I figured out what people meant when they said, "Cloud Computing". --You'd have to be nuts to store personal important documents out there on the web and not keep a local copy.
I can see the advantage for large companies using specific paid plans with expanding and contracting resources depending on the scale of their operations. That sounds like it could be smart, with the right level of oversight and the recognition that there's no free lunch. But for personal use? You'd have to be totally nuts. --Heck, how many times a week do you go to a website only to discover that it fails to connect or otherwise flakes out?
A LOT more often, I bet, than my home computer suffers a catastrophic meltdown where I can't even retrieve back-ups.
I don't want to sound crotchety, but the Cloud is just another case of people being swept up in hype and failing to think. Too bad. Maybe they should remember how this pans out for them and then the next time a similar hype pattern begins to emerge in the world, they can map the two patterns together and then perhaps not act like fools. I'm not holding my breath.
What, specifically, are you smoking? And where can I get some?
Around where I live, we just call it, "Air". You don't even have to burn it before inhaling. Try opening your window maybe?
To be fair, though, I think it has more to do with refusing to have a crappy, soul-sucking job. Whenever I've had one of those, I find I turn into a zombie and my creative furnaces close down to a measly pilot light; it feels like living with that crappy Dolby noise-reduction filter from 80's stereo systems engaged on my brain. (Which, I'm told, is what it can feel like for some people who take anti-depressants). --I find I dream and think and live far more brightly when my soul isn't forced through a black & white filter.
What color are apples around your neck of the woods?
Oooh. Nice. It would have been neat if they had continued to develop this particular idea, but it appears that the company abandoned the product back in the 90's. Even their website is gone. But I'm sure now that display technology has caught up to the vision that we'll be seeing more products like this, perhaps even for the conventional consumer market.
See, someone attempts to "sound reasonable" and provides not a shred or nugget of evidence. You are not reasonable, you are a Gore shrill, admit it.
Ha ha! It's shill, Gumby, not "shrill". And I thought I was pretty clear about saying it was my opinion. If you want evidence, sorry; you're on your own. I've spent several years trying to figure my own way out of the box and the best I've got so far is an opinion. What you believe is your own problem.
When I was a kid in drafting class at my old highschool I thought to myself. . , "One day in the F*U*T*U*R*E this big drafting board will be digital! Won't that be cool? Where you can have a digital air brush and a digital pencil, etc. That'll be cool! I REALLY want to see that. Everything feels a little wrong with that not being in existence."
Well, we're getting closer to that reality. Some of the Wacom technology these days is getting pretty impressive, if still clunky.
Anyway, I half-really believe that the world is one big dream sequence. --And I don't know about the rest of everybody out there, but whenever I dream, dream content usually takes the form of a problem. As a for instance, only a few hours ago I was dreaming a D&D game involving this totally hot friend of mine. She's about as far from 'geek' and D&D as one can get, so it was a pretty ridiculous dream. Anyway, there we were, me, one other geek friend whose face I can't remember for the life of me, and this super-hot yoga-teacher friend of mine. And she's like, "I want to try D&D. Can you set up a game?" And I'm all, "Well, I haven't played in a few years, but I could probably arrange something." And because it's a dream, there we were, walking around in actual Middle Earth, dressed up in our D&D personaes (I'm wearing this idiotic bear skin and carrying a club in one hand and a player's manual in the other. She's done up in a wizard's outfit and having a frustrating time working out how the spells work. WOTC apparently can't even get it right in a dream. Ha ha!)
Anyway, the game is advancing, but there's this problem in the back of my mind. "She's not supposed to be here. This is just not who she is." And it's bothering me; I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. That's the problem, and because it's a dream, I actually care. So anyway, we wander into a town on our third evening of gaming. The NPC's living there tell us of a dragon in the mountains yonder which needs slaying, and my hot yoga friend finally sighs heavily and says, "You know, I just want to hang out here and bake pies and sell them at the local market. You two go on ahead and fight the monsters. I don't think I'm really into D&D, but thanks for letting me try."
And just as I was saying, "Yeah, well it was good to try this out, but no prob-" and I woke up.
That's a pretty basic example, and that's how it always goes. Right when things resolve, whether trying to pass an exam in dream school, or climb a dream mountain, or working out how to dream fly or whatever, right when everything that should be balances with what actually is, that's when I wake up.
And here's how all this equates to thin-screens. . .
When digital table-tops finally become a common reality, when you can pick up a virtual pen and draw picture and use your fingers to pull around virtual documents. . , when the digital drafting board is a common reality, that's when my own personal dream of life will have resolved. That's the lynch pin. And we're getting pretty close.
I wonder what happens when I wake up. I hope the rest of you don't pop out of existence.
Every third post on this difficult and complex subject is about eight vertical text inches of solid and earnest thinking. The brain cells are firing nicely and people are really considering this issue. It's nice to see so many varied ideas.
I have my own opinions, which in a nutshell are these. . .
Man-Bear-Pig was unfair, thanks Parker & Stone. You try hard, your contributions to rational debate are appreciated, but you take rather too many over-the-counter no-doze drugs to be entirely reliable and effective researchers. You also have accumulated rather too many barnacles on the ship of your public opinion to back down from opinions you might later realize are incomplete or outright misinformed. Basically, you are human.
Even at the end of, "An Inconvenient Truth" the notion was laid out that too much glacial melt stops the ocean convection currents and turns on the planetary big freeze. So Global Warming isn't global warming at all. It's Global Cooling. I've yet to see any evidence to the contrary and so I don't really understand why everybody is pissed off with whatshisname. . , Gore and his video. Despite imperfect data, he's basically right to be concerned about climate change. The weather is totally messed up. Anybody with a balcony window and a memory which goes back more than twenty years can (and will) tell you as much.)
It's the governments and political maneuvering which are annoying. Everybody with a stick in the fire is trying to take advantage of the situation. Fuck that. I don't think anything can actually be done. The cattle will be eaten. It's not in our hands anymore. We're too stupid and ignorant and easily manipulated as a race. Too bad. The blood will flow. But thankfully, that's just one step in a much larger program of existence.
Having thought over my own question, I realize that I was typing faster than my own mind was working. Because, of course, there is another element at play also. Another kind of power is being ignored. . .
And that's social power. --That is, the already wealthy currently trade on fossil fuel wealth. It is interesting to note that through all the various twists and turns of our exploration of electricity generation as a culture, that coal and oil remain at the top of the game. Hydro electric power-generation was impossible to suppress because it is so obvious and was in fact in use to fuel much of the industrial revolution. So that cat was already out of the bag. It is also vastly more powerful than you give it credit, a real here-and-now panacea which is under-employed.
Geothermal is the one I find curious in its absence. Once you dig the hole, the energy is free. The energy potential is vast to the point of effectively being infinite, and yet aside from the odd Norwegian winter bather, we've totally ignored it as a race. That cat is asleep in its bag. And the bag was tossed into a cement-filled foundation. (Probably the foundation of a large banking complex.) But anyway. . .
Cold fusion is another one which got stomped hard and fast. Cheap and clean and free. That's a big no-no! I had a friend in the secret military who told me that cold fusion was ancient tech and that free energy today is light years beyond such concepts now. But that's not something I can verify for anybody but myself, so it's neither here nor there. The point of the matter is that Nuclear energy is expensive, dirty and probably only came into existence because it was another cat out of the bag after WWII; a required annoyance to the Oil power elite in order for the cold war to be declared. I'm sure when the losses in fossil fuel sales due to nuclear power were offset against sales of fossil fuel and weapons production to the military industrial complex were added up and compared, that the elite came out on top by a wide margin. And nuclear since then has not really a problem because it was, as you point out, shut down. Except it wasn't the NIMBY forces who did it. Well, that was the excuse, but like any large social movement, the common people were directed by the media which in turn is directed by the oil elite.
What I find astonishing and about which I am quite leery given past patterns is that we have frickin' windmills and solar panel technology proliferating at all. That worries me because never have the super-wealthy allowed the peons to enjoy anything healthy or good without either trying to limit it severely, destroy it outright, or allow it to exist in apparent freedom without some kind of bait & switch maneuver planned for sometime down the road. --What worries me is that I suspect we are simply so far along toward the endgame that it really just doesn't matter how much power can be generated cheaply and cleanly when the entire world population is expected to be cut down by more than 90% in the next few years. "Let the slaves have their damned cake tonight. They'll all be cinders in the morning. And the promise of a measly bit of cake will keep them from storming the gates at this critical point."
Luckily evil people are shortsighted idiots, easily as stupid as the slaves they keep. The good guys are still going to come out on top. The problem is that Good = Aware, and there just aren't that many of us around.
We have laws, you either follow them, or act to change them, or get punished through them. This is how society works.
Yeah, if you believe the brochure version, which only exists on glossy paper in the sales office.
Each of the agencies (and Dick Cheney) mentioned in the post I was responding to are guilty of numerous MASSIVE law-breakings. While Cheney certainly "worked" to change some laws (ugh), for the most part they simply ignored law altogether. And they sure as heck haven't been punished. "Society" in your context basically means, "Plantation Rules for the Sunburned to Follow on Pain of Lash" or "Do As I Say, Not As I Do".
I mean, for crying out loud! --ECHELON basically sucks up information without permission on a much wider scale than any torrent system dispenses information, but hey, that's fine. National Security, right? (Better known as, "Population control so that the elite can keep their cushy positions up in the Big House and not have to fear the exploited masses.")
Anyway, my point was more an expression of amazement at the general irony I saw in the AC's comment. "Yes, yes all that other stuff, but THIS! This is a matter of copyright violation! THIS is a serious issue, sir! Sir!"
Fuck that. It IS a serious issue, but not in the ways it is being presented. After all the bullshit economic semantic posturing is swept aside from the surface, the meta argument, the stone upon which this whole war is being waged is this: "Free Thought" --Are we allowed to share knowledge openly or not?
It's about control of our minds. Free Will versus Slavery.
I know that sounds overly high and mighty, disconnected from "reality" to some people, like an evasion from the hard "here and now", but the "here and now" for such people is a total fabrication built on the brochure bullshit sold to them exactly by the people who are enslaving them. The economy is a giant lie designed to create a legion of debt slaves and a small number of obedient managers of debt slaves. That's all. Nothing more. I'm not even talking metaphorically; that's how it works. Money IS debt. And such people who buy into that scam, who believe in the hard "here and now" are already lost, fallen pawns, content to read their brochures while they are being raped and bled.
Seriously... Why are we bothering with this nonsense. There is no way this system can produce that much power and it seems ridiculously destructive to the environment. Nuclear power is the way to go! The Greenpeace crowd needs to acknowledge that they've done more harm than good, in lobbying against nuclear power.
What's with the love affair between geeks and nuclear power? Is it because its science is somehow more "exciting" and "spacey" than other areas of exploration?
There are two main problems with nuclear. . .
1. It creates very, very toxic shit which never goes away and is a huge pain in the ass to store.
2. While in theory it can be run safely, human stupidity results in toxic spills and catastrophic failures. --A friend of mine lived in a town with a big honking nuclear reactor. Radioactive water was leaching into the ground water. Nice. Incompetence and corruption were to blame for the failure to implement proper maintenance on an aging reactor. Basically Homer Simpson and Mr. Burns were (and remain) at the helm.
There's nothing actually wrong with clean power. It works well and it doesn't create toxic waste. We live in a world where we can create power without also creating poison. That's awesome! That is the Star Trek future we could be living right now, and in many cases we already are. So I don't understand why this is even a debate unless it's purely about aesthetics; nuclear power is a fashion accessory which goes well with some people's preferred mode of reality. Or something.
You now believe that copyright violation is the most serious bit of public misbehavior a citizen can get up to. --And, no, I'm not talking about this particular incident, or that particular website, (which I've never even heard of). I'm talking about the national freak-out which began with Napster, and which I was laughing at way back then, but have come to seriously believe may be the crowbar used to justify the final descent into totalitarianism. That's how ludicrous this has all become.
Ooooooh. Somebody didn't watch adverts while downloading a crappy bit of Hollywood. Opiate of the masses, and now the latest excuse to storm your home with the most recent incarnation of the Gestapo.
That and Organic Farming, for equally preposterous reasons. A cat can NOT look at a king and you WILL eat toxic food.
As I understand things, it is unrealistic to think that the Government and related military bodies were conspiring together, as it implies a singularity of intent within a ridiculously massive structure. It's like saying that the Government is one thing when really it's a huge collection of many forces working at counter-purposes, operating from different levels of knowledge and awareness, having different sources of funding and which answer to numerous different authorities which are rarely in agreement, -and for which even the most basic levels of public oversight are cosmetic and generally useless.
Also, you didn't mention Big Business and, Foreign *cough Israel* Governments in your two options, which combined with the above, all comes together to create what is known as the Military Industrial Complex. --A concept which is largely misunderstood. The MIC is a giant, hopelessly complex, corrupt, world-spanning system in which it is entirely possible for small groups of people to work in secret to enact whatever agendas they feel obliged to visit upon the world. It happens all the time, except instead of pushing unsafe hormones past public oversight bodies and into cow's milk, or selling toxic peanuts or ripping off the public through savings and loans scandals, or selling Palestinian pancreases on the black market, or selling drugs to fund contra rebels, or whatever, this piece of bullshit happened to use airplanes and be more in your face and ambitious than the usual con job. But clearly it wasn't overly-ambitious, because all the goals have been met and nobody got caught.
Bullshit happens all the time, crafty nasty people plan in secret all the time and they get away with murder, we rarely ever find out exactly what the heck happened, and with the exception of the token sacrificial goat now and again, the people responsible never actually get punished.
And nearly everybody continues to believe what the soothing talking heads on TV have to say about it all while disregarding their own senses and while ridiculing those who have the balls to try to think for themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
The author of this article is a woman, hence introducing gender bias.
Assuming that an author is very likely going to be one gender or the other, are you suggesting that this article cannot be written without bias?
-FL
Seriously. Farmville?
I'll do you one better.
I'm annoyed that I need a Facebook account just to receive what we used to call, "Email".
The advantage I see is that open messages can turn into impromptu, albeit simple discussion forums with built-in photo catalogs. This can be more useful than email for some jobs.
But that's not what it's all about, as Farmville indicates. I think Facebook touches some kind of primal-tribal-pack-animal nerve. Farmville itself might represent more than just a dumb game with an addictive tamagachi edge. It might be a subconscious response to the fact that our food supply is precarious and stupid and that survival might fairly soon depend upon being able to raise chickens and grow potatoes in your back yard.
-FL
My heart bleeds regularly, and I haven't trusted the veracity of the scientific community in forever. In fact, the two conditions are a direct result of one another.
My rule of thumb is this. . .
"If evil can gain from lying, then you can rest assured that the popular media view is faulty."
Also. . .
"There is an inverse ratio between the monetary value of a lie and the veracity of its claim."
-FL
you've been staring at it your whole life and adding the "t", haven't you?
Wow.
Well, you know what they say about today being the first day of the rest of one's life. . .
I've had more "born again" moments than the Evangelical Society.
-FL
If (true) instinct tells you this was the best course, then it probably was.
Teachers with genuinely good stuff between their ears are a very valuable commodity. I don't know what I would have done without the couple of awesome teachers I had while growing up. Kept me from being crushed by the system and encouraged unconventional thinking. I'm a happy man today partly because of good teachers who weren't just system-bots but actually understood what it meant to be human.
Cheers to you, mate!
-Mark
Leonard Nimoy is smiling.
Let's take a look at what one of the more lucid channeled sources has to say on the matter. (Why not? We're already off the reservation with this manuscript.)
-FL
Easily the biggest WHOOOOOOOOOOOOSH I have ever seen on /.
What can I say? --I like to remain open to lateral thinking moments. It's how I learn.
Up Up and AWAAAAAY.
-FL
To start off, an expression which anyone that thinks about science should constantly keep in mind: "Data is not the plural form of anecdote". You created some sort of correlation between blood types and human physiological differences based on a single case!
Well, actually I wasn't trying to make any sort of formal argument. I was pointing out that in the cases of me and my old room mate, we happened to fit into larger patterns observed across Japanese culture. Does it mean anything? I don't know. As I said, I know next to nothing about any of this and my own evidence is purely anecdotal. I even said as much. --Though, your comment fits with my other observation; that of a curious level of over-reaction.
The presence of a shared allele only means that somewhere in the genealogy, those two individuals shared a common ancestor that carried that exact allele. However, all the other genes in the genome of the two individuals could be completely different
True, there is a diffusive force in play over time as humans procreate, but how diffusive is the question when it comes to what ends up being expressed and how likely that expression is to occur across a population sample. It's largely a game of averages, but my immediate impression is that the averages might well fall in favor of there being larger patterns people can benefit from knowing about. In any case, the common personality traits noted in the blood types seem to hold true for me. --And now that I think of it, they also seem to hold for the handful of other type O's I know of, though I've only ever explored blood-type in relation to diet. Have you ever stopped eating red meat for an extended period of several weeks at a time? Might be worth running a few dietary experiments to see what makes you feel better or worse.
Blood type, whether you like it or not, appears to be a valid and useful bit of information to have at hand when working out what sort of diet works best for a given individual. I honestly doubt it is a hard and fast rule for everybody; human bodies are incredibly complex things with so many variables, but it's foolish to reject it out of hand simply because it offends some sort of value which appears to be more aesthetic than rational in geek code.
As for personality types. . , based on the ways genetic dispersion behaves in mixed populations, there seem to be logical grounds for further exploration of the idea. By contrast, the sceptical desire to shut off ALL thinking on the subject with extreme prejudice is simply not cool. Prejudice is silly.
For now, I appear to have an interesting piece of diagnostic information at my disposal which I am going to keep in mind as I continue to measure the world around me. Right now it doesn't hold much weight to me because I've only looked seriously at a couple of cases in hindsight, but if over time the correlations stack up, I'll give it more weight accordingly. If it turns out after enough information collection to be bunk, then I'll ditch it. Simple as that, and yet this is a terrifying system of learning for many people, especially geeks.
I think the reason this approach is so very offensive to so many geeks is that we, (cuz I am also a geek), have been taught to connect our self-worth to the validity of the ideas we think. We have been taught to feel shame for being mistaken about anything. This is a real tragedy, because the only way to learn anything directly is to explore openly and to wear different hats. This will naturally lead to following false ideas now and again. Until one is cool with being wrong, and sadly, being judged and laughed at, one will only ever be able to parrot officially sanctioned information and never know anything of value through direct exposure. It's like only ever reading about color or music.
I stopped being scared of ridicule a long time ago. I highly recommend it!
-FL
People look uncomfortable because *you're* full of shit. Sceptic means exactly the same as skeptic. Septic is the spelling that refers to a tank for holding sewage.
Oh dear! Touched a nerve, did we?
The spelling depends on which dictionary you happen to be reading from. For some reason which I find curious, dictionary instances of the double spelling are much more difficult to find on-line than they were only a few years ago. Though I distinctly remember seeing the alternative spelling in dictionaries when I was a kid, they appear to no longer be available today. But I am clearly not the only one who remembers growing up with this alternative spelling being part of our basic reality. Others in the medical profession use the term frequently. Despite the difficulty presented by Google's auto-spell correcting filters which might even have something to do with this retroactive editing of a whole word, there are plenty of examples of people using the alternative spelling. Doctors and scientists and journalists and such. . .
here. . .
Exploding the albumin myth by M.M. Tjoeng; A.K.M. Bartelink; L.G. Thijs (pp. 17-20).
In this article arguments are given to stop the current practise of infusing albumin in patients in shock and low levels of serum albumin. Correcting the albumin levels is not correlated with better survival or change in morbidity. Fluid therapy including the use of synthetic plasma expanders is the accepted therapy for patients in sceptic shock.
and here
9. SAVU L., ZOUAGHI H., CARLI A., and NUNEZ E., 1981
Serum depletion of cortisolsteroid binding-activities, an early marker of human sceptic shock.
Biochem. Biophys. Res. Comm., 102, 411-419
and here
If the bacteria get into the bloodstream they can cause septicaemia, sceptic shock and pneumonia. Infection can be fatal.
and here
The pope's condition was 'very serious' after deteriorating dramatically following the heart attack, sceptic shock and a urinary tract infection, the Vatican announced early Friday, but by midday he had rallied somewhat and his condition was reported to be 'stable'.
and here
Additionally the programme will also cover the issues surrounding community versus hospital acquired infection and include a session focussing specifically on sepsis and sceptic shock.
and here
But the next day after vomiting several times, Mrs McCarthy was readmitted to the hospitals A&E department where doctors diagnosed sceptic shock.
and here
(Dr Langley) I believe that priority areas should be those research fields where procedures of the greatest severity are conducted on animals, and those fields which use the largest numbers of animals. I would select two particular main areas: one is fundamental medical research. I would say that is a priority target, because it accounts for one-third of all animal procedures and includes experiments of substantial severity for animals, especially in the development of models of human conditions, such as diabetes, sceptic shock, cancer, and liver and kidney failure.
and here
I was developing sceptic shock and I couldn't get through to anyone on the phone. I had to give myself an intramuscular injection of antibiotics.
and here
As an example, when Celltech announced the failure of its
Just remembered this with reference to Star Wars. . .
http://radioactivepanda.com/comic/30
Cheers!
-FL
One of my ex-girlfriends had this gorgeous Underwood typewriter which she was given as a gift and she displays in her livingroom. It has a nice aesthetic quality which engages the imagination. --If it had been owned by a famous writer from its age, then it would send thrill-chills down my spine just being near it. --Imagine Mark Twain's fountain pen (or whatever he used) on your desk.
Perhaps when enough time has passed that computers and keyboards are irrelevant, out-moded technology, where few enough still exist that they are museum pieces from a past age, then I imagine they will hold a similar aesthetic quality for people. Especially if you happened to own one which belonged to a famous, culture-shaping individual.
But I suspect we'll have to wait another century or so before we know who will be remembered and revered and who will be lost in time.
Roddenberry? Maybe. I'd place my bets on Charles Schultz and Bill Waterson more than I do on Neal Stephenson. -George Lucas, too, if he'd had the good grace to die before Phantom Menace. (Sorry, George, but it's true.)
-FL
Ha ha! I said "Tenants" of science. Like they pay rent or something. :)
-FL
I don't know much about this blood type thing, but a cursory look suggests that the foundation holds some logic.
The blood types, like any difference owed to evolutionary forces, have roots which can be traced with relative ease across anthropological history.
For instance, type O's owe their genetic origins to hunter-gatherers; they thrive on foods available to such cultures, i.e., red meat and complex animal fats whereas they are not primed for efficient digestion and use of grains and similar plant materials. I know this from direct experience; I lived in a vegetarian household and gave up meat for the years that I was there. I turned into a pasty zombie and had head-aches all the time. Whereas one of the other guys living in the same place somehow managed, on essentially the same diet, to maintain a robust and healthy body. When I moved out and started eating meat again, literally within a couple of days, suddenly had color in my face again and felt strength flow back through me. It was like I'd woken up. Out of interest, we compared blood types, and sure enough, his was one of those which thrives on grains and plants and doesn't do well at all with meats. I turned out to be a type-O, and so the opposite is true for me in terms of diet. In any case, this isn't contested science.
Now how might this affect personality. . ?
Well, sheesh, I'm no anthropologist but I can certainly follow the logic wherein evolutionary genetics would favor those individuals who are successful on the hunt and filter out those characteristics which make for unsuccessful hunters of red meat. Further, brain chemistry and hormone balances are a huge part of the whole human equation, much of which is controlled through genetics. --And as brain chemistry and hormone balances make a huge impact upon behavior, I can easily see how generalized behavior patterns across populations might group with differing blood type on a Venn diagram.
I'm not saying that I know this for certain; I'd have to study it more closely to get a better idea, but the logic appears reasonable on the surface, and my own personality lines up with the claims. So based on this, my reaction is not that of the post author who without any examples lays down accusations of pseudo-science and calls for "Something" to be done about it. Sounds like a spooky bit of witch-hunting to me.
Now I can see how pop culture can take an idea like blood-type personality reading and spin it out of control into ridiculous places, but all in all, there is a lot more logic based on accepted science here than one can find with Astrology for instance, and yet the knee-jerk sceptics are reacting as though they've been stung. --Now THAT reaction is something I find worthy of investigation. What is it that the sceptics are so afraid of here that they are willing to act before thinking whilst supposedly championing the tenants of science?
There needs to be a word for "sceptics" of that nature. Personally, I like the fact that the word can be spelled in two ways; with a "C" and with a "K". --And that "Sceptic" when pronounced with a soft "c" refers to sewage. But for some reason people look uncomfortable when I bring that up. Probably in the same way those emu glance across the veldt at the lions. (Sorry. Couldn't resist. ;-)
-FL
I find this particular flavor of insanity both sickly-disturbing and somewhat fascinating. That it happens to come from Frank Zappa doesn't validate it for me. He's just a creep who happened to get some spotlight.
I've seen this kind of disjointed writing style appear throughout the cult/conspiracy/fringe-science field and whenever it appears, there seem to be certain features which remain common between each example. That is, it appears to be evidence of a very specific kind of mind problem.
Anyway, it just struck me now that this type of personality would make a great tool in sculpting public awareness. --As I said, there is something very disturbing about this type of writing. It creates, in me anyway, a deep and strong emotional response. I just want to get the hell away from whoever is acting this way. It's clearly an automatic response, probably linked to some sort of disease avoidance. I don't want to catch whatever the heck is wrong with the person writing this way. --And I'd be surprised if this kind of response isn't common among most healthy people.
When grape farmers want to stop birds from destroying their crops, they employ a variety of different deterrents. Everything from scare-crows propane noise cannons called, "Bird Bangers". --Well, anyway, one system which is used employs speakers and the recorded sound of a dying crow. This apparently plays upon an aspect of avian psychology; when birds hear one of their kind howling in pain, they stay away. Human beings, animals that we are, are similarly wired with these deep and ancient response mechanisms. And when it comes to human manipulation, it is a very safe bet that somebody, somewhere with vast resources has probably not only considered every facet of the question, "How to manipulate populations", but has also come up with practical systems employing what they have learned. That is, if I can think it up on my free time, then somebody with a great deal more paid time and resources has very likely gotten there first and is actively using it.
A few damaged humans prodded into the right fields would certainly act as a psychological deterrent to other humans. Or in the case of Zappa and similar, used to pull listeners into darkness. (A great way to subvert the Hippie movement.)
Just a thought.
-FL
This is one of those things where I've been sort of blinking to myself ever since I figured out what people meant when they said, "Cloud Computing". --You'd have to be nuts to store personal important documents out there on the web and not keep a local copy.
I can see the advantage for large companies using specific paid plans with expanding and contracting resources depending on the scale of their operations. That sounds like it could be smart, with the right level of oversight and the recognition that there's no free lunch. But for personal use? You'd have to be totally nuts. --Heck, how many times a week do you go to a website only to discover that it fails to connect or otherwise flakes out?
A LOT more often, I bet, than my home computer suffers a catastrophic meltdown where I can't even retrieve back-ups.
I don't want to sound crotchety, but the Cloud is just another case of people being swept up in hype and failing to think. Too bad. Maybe they should remember how this pans out for them and then the next time a similar hype pattern begins to emerge in the world, they can map the two patterns together and then perhaps not act like fools. I'm not holding my breath.
-FL
What, specifically, are you smoking? And where can I get some?
Around where I live, we just call it, "Air". You don't even have to burn it before inhaling. Try opening your window maybe?
To be fair, though, I think it has more to do with refusing to have a crappy, soul-sucking job. Whenever I've had one of those, I find I turn into a zombie and my creative furnaces close down to a measly pilot light; it feels like living with that crappy Dolby noise-reduction filter from 80's stereo systems engaged on my brain. (Which, I'm told, is what it can feel like for some people who take anti-depressants). --I find I dream and think and live far more brightly when my soul isn't forced through a black & white filter.
What color are apples around your neck of the woods?
-FL
Oooh. Nice. It would have been neat if they had continued to develop this particular idea, but it appears that the company abandoned the product back in the 90's. Even their website is gone. But I'm sure now that display technology has caught up to the vision that we'll be seeing more products like this, perhaps even for the conventional consumer market.
-FL
See, someone attempts to "sound reasonable" and provides not a shred or nugget of evidence. You are not reasonable, you are a Gore shrill, admit it.
Ha ha! It's shill, Gumby, not "shrill". And I thought I was pretty clear about saying it was my opinion. If you want evidence, sorry; you're on your own. I've spent several years trying to figure my own way out of the box and the best I've got so far is an opinion. What you believe is your own problem.
Good luck with that.
-FL
When I was a kid in drafting class at my old highschool I thought to myself. . , "One day in the F*U*T*U*R*E this big drafting board will be digital! Won't that be cool? Where you can have a digital air brush and a digital pencil, etc. That'll be cool! I REALLY want to see that. Everything feels a little wrong with that not being in existence."
Well, we're getting closer to that reality. Some of the Wacom technology these days is getting pretty impressive, if still clunky.
Anyway, I half-really believe that the world is one big dream sequence. --And I don't know about the rest of everybody out there, but whenever I dream, dream content usually takes the form of a problem. As a for instance, only a few hours ago I was dreaming a D&D game involving this totally hot friend of mine. She's about as far from 'geek' and D&D as one can get, so it was a pretty ridiculous dream. Anyway, there we were, me, one other geek friend whose face I can't remember for the life of me, and this super-hot yoga-teacher friend of mine. And she's like, "I want to try D&D. Can you set up a game?" And I'm all, "Well, I haven't played in a few years, but I could probably arrange something." And because it's a dream, there we were, walking around in actual Middle Earth, dressed up in our D&D personaes (I'm wearing this idiotic bear skin and carrying a club in one hand and a player's manual in the other. She's done up in a wizard's outfit and having a frustrating time working out how the spells work. WOTC apparently can't even get it right in a dream. Ha ha!)
Anyway, the game is advancing, but there's this problem in the back of my mind. "She's not supposed to be here. This is just not who she is." And it's bothering me; I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. That's the problem, and because it's a dream, I actually care. So anyway, we wander into a town on our third evening of gaming. The NPC's living there tell us of a dragon in the mountains yonder which needs slaying, and my hot yoga friend finally sighs heavily and says, "You know, I just want to hang out here and bake pies and sell them at the local market. You two go on ahead and fight the monsters. I don't think I'm really into D&D, but thanks for letting me try."
And just as I was saying, "Yeah, well it was good to try this out, but no prob-" and I woke up.
That's a pretty basic example, and that's how it always goes. Right when things resolve, whether trying to pass an exam in dream school, or climb a dream mountain, or working out how to dream fly or whatever, right when everything that should be balances with what actually is, that's when I wake up.
And here's how all this equates to thin-screens. . .
When digital table-tops finally become a common reality, when you can pick up a virtual pen and draw picture and use your fingers to pull around virtual documents. . , when the digital drafting board is a common reality, that's when my own personal dream of life will have resolved. That's the lynch pin. And we're getting pretty close.
I wonder what happens when I wake up. I hope the rest of you don't pop out of existence.
(Take that Gordon Moore.)
-FL
Every third post on this difficult and complex subject is about eight vertical text inches of solid and earnest thinking. The brain cells are firing nicely and people are really considering this issue. It's nice to see so many varied ideas.
I have my own opinions, which in a nutshell are these. . .
Man-Bear-Pig was unfair, thanks Parker & Stone. You try hard, your contributions to rational debate are appreciated, but you take rather too many over-the-counter no-doze drugs to be entirely reliable and effective researchers. You also have accumulated rather too many barnacles on the ship of your public opinion to back down from opinions you might later realize are incomplete or outright misinformed. Basically, you are human.
Even at the end of, "An Inconvenient Truth" the notion was laid out that too much glacial melt stops the ocean convection currents and turns on the planetary big freeze. So Global Warming isn't global warming at all. It's Global Cooling. I've yet to see any evidence to the contrary and so I don't really understand why everybody is pissed off with whatshisname. . , Gore and his video. Despite imperfect data, he's basically right to be concerned about climate change. The weather is totally messed up. Anybody with a balcony window and a memory which goes back more than twenty years can (and will) tell you as much.)
It's the governments and political maneuvering which are annoying. Everybody with a stick in the fire is trying to take advantage of the situation. Fuck that. I don't think anything can actually be done. The cattle will be eaten. It's not in our hands anymore. We're too stupid and ignorant and easily manipulated as a race. Too bad. The blood will flow. But thankfully, that's just one step in a much larger program of existence.
-FL
Well put.
Having thought over my own question, I realize that I was typing faster than my own mind was working. Because, of course, there is another element at play also. Another kind of power is being ignored. . .
And that's social power. --That is, the already wealthy currently trade on fossil fuel wealth. It is interesting to note that through all the various twists and turns of our exploration of electricity generation as a culture, that coal and oil remain at the top of the game. Hydro electric power-generation was impossible to suppress because it is so obvious and was in fact in use to fuel much of the industrial revolution. So that cat was already out of the bag. It is also vastly more powerful than you give it credit, a real here-and-now panacea which is under-employed.
Geothermal is the one I find curious in its absence. Once you dig the hole, the energy is free. The energy potential is vast to the point of effectively being infinite, and yet aside from the odd Norwegian winter bather, we've totally ignored it as a race. That cat is asleep in its bag. And the bag was tossed into a cement-filled foundation. (Probably the foundation of a large banking complex.) But anyway. . .
Cold fusion is another one which got stomped hard and fast. Cheap and clean and free. That's a big no-no! I had a friend in the secret military who told me that cold fusion was ancient tech and that free energy today is light years beyond such concepts now. But that's not something I can verify for anybody but myself, so it's neither here nor there. The point of the matter is that Nuclear energy is expensive, dirty and probably only came into existence because it was another cat out of the bag after WWII; a required annoyance to the Oil power elite in order for the cold war to be declared. I'm sure when the losses in fossil fuel sales due to nuclear power were offset against sales of fossil fuel and weapons production to the military industrial complex were added up and compared, that the elite came out on top by a wide margin. And nuclear since then has not really a problem because it was, as you point out, shut down. Except it wasn't the NIMBY forces who did it. Well, that was the excuse, but like any large social movement, the common people were directed by the media which in turn is directed by the oil elite.
What I find astonishing and about which I am quite leery given past patterns is that we have frickin' windmills and solar panel technology proliferating at all. That worries me because never have the super-wealthy allowed the peons to enjoy anything healthy or good without either trying to limit it severely, destroy it outright, or allow it to exist in apparent freedom without some kind of bait & switch maneuver planned for sometime down the road. --What worries me is that I suspect we are simply so far along toward the endgame that it really just doesn't matter how much power can be generated cheaply and cleanly when the entire world population is expected to be cut down by more than 90% in the next few years. "Let the slaves have their damned cake tonight. They'll all be cinders in the morning. And the promise of a measly bit of cake will keep them from storming the gates at this critical point."
Luckily evil people are shortsighted idiots, easily as stupid as the slaves they keep. The good guys are still going to come out on top. The problem is that Good = Aware, and there just aren't that many of us around.
Ah well. Just a few thoughts tossed out there.
-FL
We have laws, you either follow them, or act to change them, or get punished through them. This is how society works.
Yeah, if you believe the brochure version, which only exists on glossy paper in the sales office.
Each of the agencies (and Dick Cheney) mentioned in the post I was responding to are guilty of numerous MASSIVE law-breakings. While Cheney certainly "worked" to change some laws (ugh), for the most part they simply ignored law altogether. And they sure as heck haven't been punished. "Society" in your context basically means, "Plantation Rules for the Sunburned to Follow on Pain of Lash" or "Do As I Say, Not As I Do".
I mean, for crying out loud! --ECHELON basically sucks up information without permission on a much wider scale than any torrent system dispenses information, but hey, that's fine. National Security, right? (Better known as, "Population control so that the elite can keep their cushy positions up in the Big House and not have to fear the exploited masses.")
Anyway, my point was more an expression of amazement at the general irony I saw in the AC's comment. "Yes, yes all that other stuff, but THIS! This is a matter of copyright violation! THIS is a serious issue, sir! Sir!"
Fuck that. It IS a serious issue, but not in the ways it is being presented. After all the bullshit economic semantic posturing is swept aside from the surface, the meta argument, the stone upon which this whole war is being waged is this: "Free Thought" --Are we allowed to share knowledge openly or not?
It's about control of our minds. Free Will versus Slavery.
I know that sounds overly high and mighty, disconnected from "reality" to some people, like an evasion from the hard "here and now", but the "here and now" for such people is a total fabrication built on the brochure bullshit sold to them exactly by the people who are enslaving them. The economy is a giant lie designed to create a legion of debt slaves and a small number of obedient managers of debt slaves. That's all. Nothing more. I'm not even talking metaphorically; that's how it works. Money IS debt. And such people who buy into that scam, who believe in the hard "here and now" are already lost, fallen pawns, content to read their brochures while they are being raped and bled.
-FL
Seriously... Why are we bothering with this nonsense. There is no way this system can produce that much power and it seems ridiculously destructive to the environment.
Nuclear power is the way to go! The Greenpeace crowd needs to acknowledge that they've done more harm than good, in lobbying against nuclear power.
What's with the love affair between geeks and nuclear power? Is it because its science is somehow more "exciting" and "spacey" than other areas of exploration?
There are two main problems with nuclear. . .
1. It creates very, very toxic shit which never goes away and is a huge pain in the ass to store.
2. While in theory it can be run safely, human stupidity results in toxic spills and catastrophic failures. --A friend of mine lived in a town with a big honking nuclear reactor. Radioactive water was leaching into the ground water. Nice. Incompetence and corruption were to blame for the failure to implement proper maintenance on an aging reactor. Basically Homer Simpson and Mr. Burns were (and remain) at the helm.
There's nothing actually wrong with clean power. It works well and it doesn't create toxic waste. We live in a world where we can create power without also creating poison. That's awesome! That is the Star Trek future we could be living right now, and in many cases we already are. So I don't understand why this is even a debate unless it's purely about aesthetics; nuclear power is a fashion accessory which goes well with some people's preferred mode of reality. Or something.
-FL
Mission Accomplished.
You now believe that copyright violation is the most serious bit of public misbehavior a citizen can get up to. --And, no, I'm not talking about this particular incident, or that particular website, (which I've never even heard of). I'm talking about the national freak-out which began with Napster, and which I was laughing at way back then, but have come to seriously believe may be the crowbar used to justify the final descent into totalitarianism. That's how ludicrous this has all become.
Ooooooh. Somebody didn't watch adverts while downloading a crappy bit of Hollywood. Opiate of the masses, and now the latest excuse to storm your home with the most recent incarnation of the Gestapo.
That and Organic Farming, for equally preposterous reasons. A cat can NOT look at a king and you WILL eat toxic food.
-FL
C. Elements of both.
As I understand things, it is unrealistic to think that the Government and related military bodies were conspiring together, as it implies a singularity of intent within a ridiculously massive structure. It's like saying that the Government is one thing when really it's a huge collection of many forces working at counter-purposes, operating from different levels of knowledge and awareness, having different sources of funding and which answer to numerous different authorities which are rarely in agreement, -and for which even the most basic levels of public oversight are cosmetic and generally useless.
Also, you didn't mention Big Business and, Foreign *cough Israel* Governments in your two options, which combined with the above, all comes together to create what is known as the Military Industrial Complex. --A concept which is largely misunderstood. The MIC is a giant, hopelessly complex, corrupt, world-spanning system in which it is entirely possible for small groups of people to work in secret to enact whatever agendas they feel obliged to visit upon the world. It happens all the time, except instead of pushing unsafe hormones past public oversight bodies and into cow's milk, or selling toxic peanuts or ripping off the public through savings and loans scandals, or selling Palestinian pancreases on the black market, or selling drugs to fund contra rebels, or whatever, this piece of bullshit happened to use airplanes and be more in your face and ambitious than the usual con job. But clearly it wasn't overly-ambitious, because all the goals have been met and nobody got caught.
Bullshit happens all the time, crafty nasty people plan in secret all the time and they get away with murder, we rarely ever find out exactly what the heck happened, and with the exception of the token sacrificial goat now and again, the people responsible never actually get punished.
And nearly everybody continues to believe what the soothing talking heads on TV have to say about it all while disregarding their own senses and while ridiculing those who have the balls to try to think for themselves.
You know? Business as usual.
-FL