has nothing to do with being pro-israel, or pro-western, or anti-muslim
Oh really? Which election were you watching?
Though, I actually agree with that statement on one level, but only because I happen to think you're barking at a symptom of which religion is just a convenient appendage.
But that too is beside the point.
Because what are you suggesting exactly? (That's a rhetorical, so I'll go right ahead and answer that one for you.)
What you are suggesting without coming right out to say it, is that it would be Good and Proper for the West to go to war with Iran.
--By throwing our god of Christian-Corporatism at their god of Allah.
Do you honestly think that if the tables were turned in the world power game that the level of human degradation, slavery and general body count would be any lower?
Stop fomenting stupidity. You're a creepy nihilist. Not so deep down, nihilists want to see the world burn, and if the best way to achieve that is by stirring up ludicrous divisions between people through semi-clever words, (you only have to be semi-clever these days to stir people), then so be it.
Go make your film. Low budget horror, is it? I'd comment on what that says if it wasn't such a bloody obvious cliche.
Hm. If I was playing some adventure game on my compy and I had the option of getting up and physically entering the game world to do whatever I wanted with actual, instant feedback and consequences to my actions. . .
It's that single life and no save which makes everybody so bloody cautious. . !
And these days, one quarter only gets you about as far as it would in an arcade.
Asus is releasing its third-generation netbooks while everybody else is still adding up the sales figures on their first.
The only other company with a lead is HP, who just released its second generation. . , what do they call it? I actually got to play with one the other day. Looks nice. Still has that big keyboard, but the brushed metal case is gone. So is the stupid price; it's actually come down a couple hundred bucks. To be honest, I didn't even bother checking it's specs, but looked pretty decent. Everybody has a netbook out now, and they all look pretty workable.
I wonder how far away we are from, "free calculator in the mail" days wrt netbooks? --Well, we probably aren't, since the difference between a computer and a calculator is that one lives in the drawer and you don't really need one except at tax time, whereas the other one is like the crack-cocaine of electronics --without the health risks or the stigma. (How many hours a day?) They'll always be able to charge lots of money for computers.
As a happy Asus owner, (a 1000H), I must say that making a larger battery sit flush with the underside is a very nice touch, and the promise of a more efficient chipset is also nice, (But 9.5 hours? Pull the other one! I'll be impressed if you get 7. Actually, I'd be very impressed, but you're still lying.). --But all of that is a little too incremental for my taste.
The only way I'd replace the little guy, (which is still just the most awesome device, thanks for asking), is when OLED screens come down in price to the point where they can be cranked out cheaply. Have you seen those things? I was looking at one in a Sony store, and you actually find yourself doing that thing which the Doctor's New Assistant always does on her first day with the TARDIS. You can't help it. The screen is only about 3mm thick, and most of that appears to be material to keep it rigid. --It's also brighter and crisper than any flat screen today, and the viewing angle question is moot.
I'll trade in my eee1000 when somebody makes a netbook with one of those screens. And maybe not even then. I only stopped using the original keyboard which came with my first PC back in the early Nineties because some of the plastic switches had decomposed beyond functionality. I like to get my money's worth!
Oh wait. Not First Post. That blip in time came and went and I missed it. I guess I don't exist.
A few points. The first one is that I remember reading a story last week about Quantum Entanglement effects which had been successfully observed acting over a whole meter. Now that's pretty cool. If our species gets that kind of technology up and running correctly, we could probably do away with the silly EM spectrum as a means of broadcast communications altogether in a decade or two. Which would mean that our race will have been broadcasting EM noise into space for less than two centuries or so. Just a blip, really. Our inane first post sent and gone as we move on to making more intelligent comments.
Also, as I'm fond of pointing out, we've been in communications with 'aliens' for quite some time now, but since it doesn't conform to the limited concept of what such a contact is supposed to be like, (according to our best minds in Sci-Fi, bless them), the whole subject is ignored.
There was something else. . .
Right!
They're already here and they've been manipulating humanity for eons. And we're food. And we all know the rule; Don't talk to your food! (Or was it, don't eat with your mouth full?) Whatever. We don't hold communion with cows. --We just breed them from the mighty horned beasts of the plains into dumbed down, obedient, drugged-up tasty bovine snacks who simply don't get that they're food. They live in cubicles, (well the pigs and chickens do, anyway), and they are fed on toxic crap and they don't think for a moment that they're going to be killed and eaten. Heck, if they had the brain tissue required, we'd probably distract them by introducing a bunch of silly stories about cows on crosses or something. --To keep them from open revolt by assuring them that all their woes and daily misery shall be rewarded when the Burger King comes down to 'save' the most righteous of the herd. And blast the rest into oblivion. It doesn't have to make sense. Cows aren't very smart. --Just so long as they don't think too hard or question anything. And believe that flaming bushes are really god and not not some manipulative rancher cattle-prodding them toward the promised land from his hyper-dimensional realm of alien sneakiness.
"As above, so below."
I find it remarkable that people really think that intelligent life would want to reach out and make friends.
Except. . , what is UP with those crop circles? You know; the ones with the magnetic seeds and EM damage which drunk engineering students make without ever being seen in the dead of night with their rope and planks. And, apparently, some means of re-writing genetic plant code so that seeds grow all funny afterward. And making sure the plants don't break, but rather bend at the stalk joint. And that the black helicopters buzz the fields, because the military are just SO fascinated by the doings of drunk pranksters.
But hold on. . , I thought there was no communication. Well, according to the various voices tumbling around space, there's more than one race, more than one state of existence, more than one agenda. And some of them make circles.
But with our tunnel vision so firmly fixed on SETI and a needle-narrow set of galactic possibilities, somehow people are prevented from seeing the messages which are practically shouted at us.
Why? How can it be that many of the same people who argue in defense of Fermi refuse to acknowledge the blatantly obvious? Isn't that a little discordant? Yes! It is. It is discordant, and this is because we're dumb cattle and we believe as we are instructed. --That aliens fly in space ships, are slaves to time, actually want to talk to us and that they'll use walkie talkies to do it. Just Like Us!
For goodness sake. The Windows 7 beta WAS the second beta release. The first was Vista, except you had to pay for it. --They might have sold enough copies to pay for the brilliant faux-failure Seinfeld campaign which garnered sympathy for Microsoft and has resulted in media praise for this latest OS. (Psyche! 101, that is.)
I remember when Vista first came out, when if you posted anything critical about it, the MS astroturfer goons, (and don't kid yourselves; Slashdot is one of the key fields for that kind of activity), blasted out of the woodwork with nullifications-aplenty. Didn't work very well, but they certainly tried. I remember the bristling you saw when you said, "Vista is a catastrophic failure and MS knows it" before general public opinion had caught up with that notion. The P.R. people don't like you doing that sort of thing while they're still gently voodooing critical mass of whatever mythology they're trying to lock in place.
One of the main reasons MS is shoving Windows 7 out the pipes so quickly, (I suspect), has to do with the fact that the U.S. dollar is on the verge of a total collapse and Bill isn't ready yet to trade in his greenbacks for the "Amero" or whatever they're going to call it. (I wonder how much gold he has stashed away to buy up the new (world order) currency with.) --Whatever the case, the market is dissolving as we speak. Plenty of downtown shop fronts are dark after the failure of Father Christmas to save the day. Gotta sell as many copies as you can of whatever you're selling before people realize that food might possibly be a more important commodity than the latest over-powered notebook surprise.
Everybody has been wishing and hoping to see Microsoft die a miserable, painful death. And now we're going to see it! Too bad we'll have to go hungry in order to have this dear wish fulfilled. But hey, no pain, no. . , well.
The funny part is that even when MS downsizes into a six man operation running out of Gate's garage and offers no customer support, the world will be addled with Russian wormy goodness and nothing to patch up the holes with. What great excuse to shut down the internet so that nobody knows when the Mongol hoards break down the gates of the rotting empire. (Or was it some Germanic barbarians. I can't remember. Those, poor, drunk, lead-poisoned Romans. Not so different today. Have you done a detox recently?)
But that's the bleak view. Perhaps it won't be so bad. Mr. Shuttleworth might just be the right man for the times. I wonder if Adobe will scramble to support Ubuntu. I wonder if gentleman Obama will be able to step up to the plate. He's not all bad. --Despite his Pakistan stance and the whole wire-tap thing, he's got some cool policies brewing. The first president to acknowledge that the U.S. isn't entirely a Christian nation. He gave a tip of the hat to atheists! Holy cow! That's a pretty neat first. So the future is really fuzzy and unpredictable now. How exciting!
But Microsoft is manning the life-rafts. I can't tell if I'm gleeful or not.
A nice bulb which doesn't spit out a mess of EM garbage and which doesn't add mercury to the local landfill like the much over-hyped CFL's which are guilty on both counts.
Though, I must say, CFL's have come a long way wrt color quality. Though. . , they still feel sort of creepy. --I like what LED technology has done for flashlights, but I'm not sure I'd enjoy living under something which feels like moonlight. I think you need some ambient heat in order to feel comfortable. Sun and Fire have a long love affair with the Human body and its sense organs. When the heat goes out of that relationship, what are you left with?
Call me a sentimentalist.
Sadly, it seems to be just a matter of time before governments outlaw incandescent bulbs. I just love the government; always working hard to serve the people the best way it knows how. You can pretty much bet that whenever governments and industry team up to hard-sell any legislation, you're being screwed in some way not immediately obvious.
People want to say video games alter people to the point where they are normal one day and killers the next. So to that we say we have played them all our lives and it has no affect on us.
Killing target after target after target doesn't directly make people into trench coat killers, but it normalizes the event to the point where when you hear about such a thing happening in the real world, your automatic reaction is not one of disgust and outrage and a feeling that we must work to decrease violence. It's one of, "Oh. Kill it back".
I'm not saying that automatic reactions are particularly good, but in the context of a world where people are cattle, being able to control how and which way they herd is valuable, especially if you want to keep people locked in a perpetual state of war.
Some of the games being played today by both kids and adults would have been utterly shocking to the world back in the days of Pac Man. This appears to have changed.
you somehow think you are better and more observant than others because you want to think other people are saying all these things don't affect them at all when really you lack contextual reading comprehension skills. In other words, you are being immature and arrogant because you think you know better than everyone else.
Hm. Pardon my own psycho-analysis, but I didn't get that so much. I could be entirely mistaken, but the poster's comment struck me more as being driven by a frustration with mass self-deception rather than an attempt to win ego points in a game of, "I'm The Smartest!". --People locked into that game are more likely to be threatened by any statement of fact coming from a peer.
Whatever the case. . . Answer a falsehood with what it calls for. The truth. If we can do that without trying to 'win' ego points, then we're doing well. It's hard to do. The ego is the gate keeper preventing us from seeing objective reality.
Some have noted that the relative size between human and bacterial cells is different. That makes sense. But still. . ! My first impulse was to look at my body and think, "So my torso, legs, arms, head. . , only 1/10th of that is human? Sure. Pull the other one. Be careful though, according to this article it might come off in your hands like a zombie limb!"
About 10 seconds of Googling informed me that estimates of the number of cells in a human body range all the way from 10 trillion to 100 trillion, (10 to the 14 power), which is on par with the bacteria count noted in the article.
And if that's the case, then it should probably be assumed that the estimates for bacteria count are probably not a chipped in stone thing either, and may indeed be much lower.
So it sounds like a bit of editorial license was being taken in order to punch up the story.
Though, the fact that they're even in the same ball park did take me aback. Hence the term, "Punch Up".
I really wouldn't be surprised if this group is run partly by people on the inside of the government or Huntington themselves as it seems like its only out to attract violent guerilla types who are willing to carry a pitchfork and a torch at the first possible opportunity.
That's a pretty reasonable assessment. One of the ways civil rights groups in the 60's were combated was to insert agents into groups whose job it was to sow dissent and splintering. Having seen how something as simple as a D&D game can dissolved by the introduction of just one new person who is brought along (because s/he has no friends and wouldn't it be nice to take pity on this difficult person), I have no doubts whatsoever that the larger and much more complex work of organizing a city, state or even country-wide activist group would be vulnerable to this kind of counter-intelligence tactic.
And you can see why. --When people DO manage to gather together into a cohesive and like-minded group which is clear of head-cases, the power to do big things effectively skyrockets. Groups like that could easily alter or even topple governments, so it is no surprise to me that the intelligence community also recognized this and had the problem analyzed, solutions proposed, and money diverted to make it happen.
If counter-intel programs were running forty years ago, why would they have stopped today? Especially with initiatives like the whole Homeland Security nightmare to juice it all up.
I loved Don Martin's stuff as a kid, but it's aged beyond relevance. Husbands don't come home and hang their business hat, (business hat??) and say, "Honeeeey, I'm Hoooome!" anymore. The whole psychological connection of the strip is lost. It didn't age well.
Spy vs Spy suffers from the same thing. The cold war is OVER. --Once brilliant, that strip is about as relevant and engaging today as Beetle Baily. (Which also once connected with people in a relevant way but which has become meaningless and prosaic.)
The only guy who still has the chops to fit today is Aragones. His "Side Lines" and basic style still shine.
I can't even remember any of the other guys doing stuff in Mad, but the collection of that bunch all at the same place and time was what floated Mad Magazine. The last issue I looked at, a couple of months ago as it happens, was just a bunch of re-tread attempts by no-name artists to copy old formulas.
It read the way the new Kermit sounds. False and without spark or meaning.
Sorry, but artistic collectives must die or change with their creators passing. The only way Mad could shine again would be if they hired on a bunch of luminary geniuses versed in comic observation and satire, (of the Jon Stewart caliber), who also happen to be able to draw in awesome, engaging styles. Not only that, but the editors would have to be willing to allow such new talent to re-invent the whole look of the magazine so that it reflected themselves. --Because anybody willing to copy a dead format and a dead style which last-gasped sometime around the 1980's is certainly not going to be particularly luminary. Any real genius would have been driven mad (ahem) over the restrictions and left asap.
And Intelligent cartoon satire hasn't vanished. There are new guys doing awesome things which don't try to be Kermit, but which are unique and genuinely exciting. XKCZ, for example, is fresh and new and. . , bloody cynical. (Imagine; there was a time when Beetle Baily was just as electric!) The big difference today is that the luminaries aren't all gathered in one convenient place anymore, and certainly not exclusively on paper. You have to go looking. --That's the part which I find most difficult. I enjoyed concentrations of work which I knew everybody else was experiencing. There was something tribal and culture-defining about it which I really drew energy from as a reader. These days, it's easy to feel disconnected.
It plays into all the things people here are most equipped to deal with. That poor teacher is so screwed; the combined resources of a world-wide network of indignant geeks versed up and down in the field of information rights. Could you ask for a better villain to throw such super-powers against?
--Though, I must say, my base-line response to post-secondary education red-tape idiocy is this: Stay the **** out of university! I find whenever friends complain to me of their woes with school administrators and teaching staff, I grind my teeth in annoyance because often the problems seem to me clearly ridiculous, petty and needlessly contrived. People arguing with enormous energy over things which not only don't freaking matter, but which DON'T FREAKING MATTER!! --Case in point: Why would anybody want to fight over a bunch of notes on a subject which, as recent history should have demonstrated by now to everybody on the whole planet, is based on a big, stinking mountain of illusions and utter, complete nonsense?
But I've mellowed over the years.
Have at it!
My response to your teacher, btw, would be this: "I didn't take any notes, you conceited wind-bag. Now get out of my lunch."
Well, okay. Assuming I'd actually taken notes, my response would be, "Are you kidding me? Seriously? This is a joke, right? How did you even get this job? You're a teacher right? What kind of engineering prof doesn't want- Sorry? What? Oh, hell! These cardboard lecture halls all look the same. --I was wondering why it was taking so long to get to gear ratios and other cool stuff. Later alligator!"
I was just thinking yesterday about how the humble virus had grown. I was wowing over the Amiga 500 my friend's older brother had bought (with his very own money!), when said older brother caught us creeping around in his room.
But instead of tossing us out like the brats we were, he came in and fired it up to show it off to us in a casual display of older-geek coolness I was deeply impressed by. The guy was hard core, heading off to study at MIT in a few months time. The best I'd ever done for geek-cred was to assemble an old Apple II by soldering where the mother board said to soldier without really knowing much about the why or wherefore, so this guy, who had built his own memory circuits on breadboards just to see if he could. . , he seemed like Batman to me. Damn, he was so cool, he even had a *girlfriend* during high school.
So he hung out with us for a while and brought us up to speed on all the coolest things going down in the world of geek lore, one item of which was that there was such a thing as the, "Computer Virus".
The concept seemed utterly sci-fi to me, and it caught my imagination like a torch. I remember wandering home with a multiplying flow-chart of possibilities developing in my mind, all leading to. . , well today actually.
The funny thing is that whenever the 'future' does happen to show up, it always seems to feel suspiciously like another bland variation of 'today', --and it never contains flying cars or Harrison Ford running around looking wounded and armed and trench-coaty. For some reason, no matter how I envision the future, it always involves imagery from Blade Runner. Either that, or the Happy Ending from one of those Sid Meyer games.
This NSA business is a side show. Of COURSE we are being spied on. We've always been spied on. This is only a debate with those who have short memories or denial issues.
It's as though people live in two separate universes but only pay attention to one of them because the other one is just too upsetting. Doesn't make it go away, though.
I was talking with a friend a couple of weeks back, and she asked me a question about something, so I answered it. She looked alarmed and upset and flew into accusations and anger and stormed away. This surprised me because I didn't think what we were talking about was even terribly interesting. It was old, old news for me.
Then the other day she phoned up and apologized. Seems she checked it out on her own and grudgingly verified the answer I'd offered her. I told her it was okay, and that it was easy for me to forget that this stuff is upsetting when you first learn about it. Scary and life-altering, and a very real option is to just block it out and pretend that everything is as we are told it is. Heck, even with Echelon, I went through a state of fear when I first learned about it and who was involved and why it was happening. But that story broke years ago now, and it was old even then. It's easy to forget that people find comfort in a continuity of reality, even if it is a false one, and that this is often why they reject new ideas.
If you are innocent, then you have nothing to worry about. That's a pretty wise assessment.
And by saying that, you just lost the right to be taken seriously.
I mean, that's right up there with, "I was just following orders."
How out of touch does a person have to be to not know this stuff? Seriously. Google for it. It's not complicated. --And frankly, it ought to be covered around the same time as street crossing safety tips and telephone etiquette.
There is no need to inject partisan politics into this issue. Each individual congressperson (democrat or republican) bears responsiblilty for the lack of oversight in this matter.
Thank-you for nipping that one in the bud so succinctly. It's far too easy to slip into old response patterns. Divide and conquer is a popular tactic because it works. It takes clarity of mind to overcome our garden variety pre-conditioning.
I hear you. But I also think that the problem with trying to work within a system to fight corruption of the system itself is largely pointless once the corruption reaches a critical mass. Eventually, you just have to say, "No" to the actors in lab coats with their authority-endowing clip boards who instruct you to increase the voltage and shock the actor strapped in the chair. Because sometimes, usually, it's not just a disturbing university social-studies experiment. The sad truth today is that official organs have become systems with the primary purpose of keeping populations enslaved, largely ignorant of the fact, and content to just go with it. --Or to be confounded when the official channels of complaint become too convoluted to be of any use, thus using up all the available energy of the complainant and leaving him or her with the feeling, "Oh well, at least I tried." The end result, as appears to be the case with you, is to simply get back to work, secure in the knowledge that you did your best. And nothing changes. A safety valve for dealing with people who have a glimmer of awareness and fight in them.
Our trust and reliance on the system to protect us, as well as our perceived duty to be loyal to that system is taught by the system itself during our youth when we are at our most trusting and our minds at their most vulnerable to manipulations from which many never recover enough to even fully recognize have even occurred. There comes a time when you have to screw up the courage and do that which is right, because secrecy is very often there primarily to protect the perps. --As is certainly the case with spying on the public.
Also, you must be cautious. When you say, "I stand by what I said," that standing is very much like the statement itself, one bound up with a notion of honor and duty to a system which hates and fears its subjects. Honor and duty are not bad things in and of themselves, but with the appropriate conditioning, they become facets of the personality which are easily redirected into empowering the corruption.
It's very easy to take offense and for the ego to scream and yell when such ideas are pointed out, but understanding our world cannot be achieved when valid notions become things to fight against for fear of 'being wrong'. This is usually what keeps people from progressing. Fear of feeling wrong. The aggression and ridicule which is so rampant on this very site is another programmed response. Geeks get it the worst, I suspect because they are generally more aware and capable of dealing with thought problems. As such, they suffer from the deepest programming, and you can see it in their reactions. I've seen spittle fly and eyes roll around like those of frightened horses when discussing benign facts and ideas. This is not rational behavior, and it comes from somewhere. All of it is yet another aspect of the control system built into use through our childhood experiences with schooling.
Objective reality is all that counts. The rest is a trap.
I've never seen such a bunch of sappy losers as the characters in BSG.
Reinforcing the lie, "Life is sad, random and mean and you can't do anything about it. Now go wallow obsessively in your misery." Random, my ass! --Heck, it's a world where when you have the audacity to celebrate even the smallest event, (your 100th flight), a freekin' missile 'randomly' chooses that moment to go off and destroy you and the moral of your entire crew. What bullshit! When event after event like that occurs, it's not random at all. It's deliberately sought out misery disguised as "Reality" Oooh, BSG is so real! It's just like life!
Stories carry a message, and BSG's message is one of despair. The Earth just happens to be a bombed out, radioactive ruin? Oh yeah. That doesn't break pattern, does it? Even if life were a series of random events, which it isn't, then BSG is still giving a false image.
The question is this: Why? Who benefits from broadcasting misery and despair into the heads of all the smart people who are responsible for engineering the infrastructure of our world?
Well, maybe not in one day, but certain much faster than people have been trained to think. Government is hopelessly complex, and this is by design, I think, to keep people gridlocked into place.
After all, solving problems would amount to letting all the human livestock leave their pens. --And this is quite literally true as per one of your examples!
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I do find myself feeling increasingly dubious about Obama, based on his actions thus far.
I'm a storyteller so I like to understand people's motivations. I have lots of trouble believing a story when I can't understand someone's motivation.
Very sensible. The problem is that motivations are like sound waves. There are lots of them out there, but only some will resonate with a given receiver. We don't really know what kind of receiver Obama is. Not yet, anyway, but there are indications. We've seen in his choice of appointments some counter-intuitive, if not outright bad picks. We've seen his reaction to the Israeli conflict. Through his comments about Hugo Chavez, we've gotten a small taste of his foreign policy wrt South America. None of these things are unforgivable, and people are quick to create logical justifications on his behalf. There is always the chance he is simply playing his cards close to his chest while consolidating a position of power so that when the time comes, he will be able to make bold moves with assurance. Kennedy was in bed with the Mob before he was able to move more freely in government, for goodness sake. But still. . . It's been raising eyebrows.
1) Why would he lie about all of the change he wants to bring about? What's in it for him to lie? He's wealthy. He has as much power as can be attained. He has a reputation to keep if he wants more money and power.
There are so many reasons here which can be borrowed from to answer that. Everything from psychopathy and Manchurian Candidate stuff, to simple idealism rebuffed by too big a counter force and not enough courage on his part. Do you indict Bush and Co. for war crimes when you know that 4 - 8 years down the road the GOP could turn around like the bunch of school yard egoists we saw evidenced in the McCain camp and do the same thing? Safer to not rock the boat. Do you go head to head with the Zionists by avoiding conflict in Iran? Do you attempt to tackle the root of the money problem? Bill Hicks put it well when he said, "I think after a new president is sworn in, they take him and put him in a small room deep underground. Then a screen rolls down, and they play the Kennedy Assassination for him, but it's footage nobody has ever seen, from a completely new camera angle. Then the screen rolls up, and they say, 'Do we have an understanding?'" --Simple fear could make a liar out of him. But again, we'd need to know what kind of receiver we're dealing with. We don't yet.
2) Why wouldn't he want to fix the economy? He does have a re-election coming up in... 4 years. It's in his best interest to do whatever it takes to improve the economy.
Fixing the economy can only be done in one way. Changing the source of money. Right now, all money in the U.S., and indeed, the entire industrialized world, is borrowed at interest from a small consortium of private bankers. Very simply, to pay back that money plus interest, you need more money than exists, because all money comes from the same source. When the world defaults, as it inevitably must every 100 years or so, the banks scoop up all the collateral; land and holdings. The current banking system is deliberately set up in this manner for one reason: Power. Barak is no fool. He knows this, as anybody with real brains in government does, but he's never mentioned it. Kennedy tried to deal with this problem through the issuance of real government dollars which were minted at zero interest. After he was killed, this policy was quietly snuffed. If Barak doesn't face down this same problem, then he is just playing along to the real powers that be, which makes him just the top slave. But it's too early to judge. Maybe he'll do something about it.
3) Nobody wants an end to the war on terror. We just want it to be fought pragmatically... by first up actually fighting terrorists instead of invading secular despot nations. Fighting terror means u
I remember a European journalist describing the population's reaction to corruption in government. He said, (and I'm paraphrasing because I cannot find the quote), "People know the government is putting on a facade, that beneath it lies fascism. But they allow this, because they've seen what overt fascism looks like, they've lived through it, and they cry, 'No, anything but that! Anything but that!'"
I've pointed this out before, but I'll do it again because I think it's an excellent example of how mind-control works. (And how smart people who strive to be media savvy are by no means outside the box of rats. --That is, it doesn't matter how smart you are, if you fail to analyze everything, then even a clever person becomes little more than a simple regime of thought patterns which can be solved for and sold to.)
The Seinfeld campaign wasn't a failure at all. --The current positive media hype about Windows 7 is the the direct result of the Seinfeld campaign. Those 300 million dollars firmly planted two things. . .
1. Gates had gone walkabout, leaving the keys with the moron who came up with Vista. Microsoft isn't Microsoft without the boy genius. Oh, and he's back to work on Windows 7. (Whether this is true or not isn't important. It's the media impression, which is all that matters.)
2. Gates is an awkward, non-charismatic computer genius geek who failed hard-core on broadcast television and we all felt SORRY for him and really want him to succeed next time. (When was the last time anybody felt sorry for gates?)
The PR company which was hired to rescue Microsoft wasn't going to be some slouch company. It will be the kind of place which hires prodigies whose bread and butter is hacking brain code. They're laughing at you right now.
The thing which made Bebop great was the larger story-line. The unfolding of the various characters as they healed themselves, or resolved their personal/emotional issues. That's what good sci-fi does these days. --Watch some of the old and loved Doctor Who episodes. The ones we (well some of 'we') thought were so great back when we were kids. By today's standards, they're amazingly FLAT; all about the plot and the cleverness and the adventure, but zero examination of the emotional dimension. These days, people are well acclimated to the science, (or whatever you want to call it). --Exploring that stuff is no longer the point of these stories. The thing we don't get, however, and which we are so driven from an instinctive level to explore is how we emotionally fit within these new concepts. The alternate realities and the high-tech wilderness of it all. People want to know how it feels to be human in an expanded set of possibilities. Emotions matter now. How cool is that?
--I mean, heck, look at the last couple of Bond movies, for goodness sake! 007 has a soul??? --He's a broken man with plenty of murder/lockpick skills, which yeah, we were all dazzled by in the 60's and 70's, but how did he get that way? Turns out, he's deeply messed up and needs a matronly M to keep his threads all tied up from unraveling. --When the question of James Bond's mental stability even crosses the public mind, you know we are living in a new era!
But to explore emotions properly in a story, you need space. Or rather, length. Emotions aren't like car chases; on one moment, off the next. It takes time for lives to unfold and relationships to evolve. Bebop, and Firefly, and Doctor Who needed a dozen or more episodes for these issues to be properly explored. You can't achieve some of the really great moments we saw in those series in a 90 minute format. Not easily, anyway. --They already made a Cowboy Bebop movie. It looked and sounded fantastic. I still listen to some of the tracks now and again. But compared to the lower budget TV series, it was listless and redundant. It was the series which sang!
Same with, "Serenity", which I know is well-loved among fan circles, but my feeling is that the popular reaction came more from the grassroots victory it represented over FOX's short-sighted cancellation of the series than it did from the movie actually being particularly great. It was clever, painfully violent, and tried to cram too much into too little, and when it ended, I was relieved and I didn't miss any of the characters. It was the series which truly studied relationships and the concept of, "Found Family"; that's what made it good. Some of the most powerful moments came with revelations of character which had been building to a crescendo for ages. --When Jane was locked outside the ship, and Mal was going to let him die for being a psychotic monster but changed his mind when Jane demonstrated that he had a semblance of a conscience. Stuff like that is gold, and I just don't think it's within the realm of likelihood that we're going to see anything resembling that in a film. Not in any meaningful way. And certainly not with a wooden post like Keanu Reeves.
Ironically, the problem is that Spike, while being the, 'Strong Silent type', was also a bit of a cheeky bugger with a lot of iron and self-confidence, whereas Keanu has never struck me as having known himself. Always a bit dreamy and confused. Poor, poor casting. --Because, I don't really believe much in, 'acting'; the eyes and unconscious, uncontrollable expressions of a person always come through the actor whether they like it or not.
The Bebop series was a great anime, and I'm as much a sucker fanboy as the next guy, so I'll probably plunk down my. . . Jeez how much does it cost to see a film these days? Well, I'll plunk that down just to see the thing. But, honestly, it would be foolish to expect much.
Heck, I'm still trying to figure out what the heck is going to happen with that Toby McGuire Macross project.
The crystals and incense folk call this, "Mercury Retrograde", and in the case of Astrology, they're actually on fairly firm ground.
Communications and technology become jumbled and fragile in these periods. Global slowdowns and best laid plans going to pot.
Watch the patterns. One of my favorites was when those 5 undersea cables got cut and the world flipped out.
Happens twice a year for about twenty days each period. Back up your stuff before these times hit. Or just yell until you're blue, "Correlation does not equal causation!" --Which is actually quite true. Mercury isn't out there with bolt cutters. It's just a means of measuring the weather patterns of reality. This period ends Feb 1st. It's generally a good idea to hold off on signing anything important or buying any new hardware until after that date.
It's not just radioactive isotopes wobbling in their decay rates in time with the Earth's orbit. Everything is affected. --There are fundamentals of matter and energy, from which consciousness arises, which are not yet properly understood by modern science, and so we have to rely on the old-wive's rosemary-smelling almanacs for guidance. I suspect if the scientific community ever got over it's understandable knee-jerk over-reaction to the stupidity of religion and actually managed to work out the mechanics behind the observations, we'd zoom ahead by lightyears in our understanding of physics.
Slashdot Mirror
has nothing to do with being pro-israel, or pro-western, or anti-muslim
Oh really? Which election were you watching?
Though, I actually agree with that statement on one level, but only because I happen to think you're barking at a symptom of which religion is just a convenient appendage.
But that too is beside the point.
Because what are you suggesting exactly? (That's a rhetorical, so I'll go right ahead and answer that one for you.)
What you are suggesting without coming right out to say it, is that it would be Good and Proper for the West to go to war with Iran.
--By throwing our god of Christian-Corporatism at their god of Allah.
Do you honestly think that if the tables were turned in the world power game that the level of human degradation, slavery and general body count would be any lower?
Stop fomenting stupidity. You're a creepy nihilist. Not so deep down, nihilists want to see the world burn, and if the best way to achieve that is by stirring up ludicrous divisions between people through semi-clever words, (you only have to be semi-clever these days to stir people), then so be it.
Go make your film. Low budget horror, is it? I'd comment on what that says if it wasn't such a bloody obvious cliche.
-FL
Hm. If I was playing some adventure game on my compy and I had the option of getting up and physically entering the game world to do whatever I wanted with actual, instant feedback and consequences to my actions. . .
It's that single life and no save which makes everybody so bloody cautious. . !
And these days, one quarter only gets you about as far as it would in an arcade.
Asus is releasing its third-generation netbooks while everybody else is still adding up the sales figures on their first.
The only other company with a lead is HP, who just released its second generation. . , what do they call it? I actually got to play with one the other day. Looks nice. Still has that big keyboard, but the brushed metal case is gone. So is the stupid price; it's actually come down a couple hundred bucks. To be honest, I didn't even bother checking it's specs, but looked pretty decent. Everybody has a netbook out now, and they all look pretty workable.
I wonder how far away we are from, "free calculator in the mail" days wrt netbooks? --Well, we probably aren't, since the difference between a computer and a calculator is that one lives in the drawer and you don't really need one except at tax time, whereas the other one is like the crack-cocaine of electronics --without the health risks or the stigma. (How many hours a day?) They'll always be able to charge lots of money for computers.
As a happy Asus owner, (a 1000H), I must say that making a larger battery sit flush with the underside is a very nice touch, and the promise of a more efficient chipset is also nice, (But 9.5 hours? Pull the other one! I'll be impressed if you get 7. Actually, I'd be very impressed, but you're still lying.). --But all of that is a little too incremental for my taste.
The only way I'd replace the little guy, (which is still just the most awesome device, thanks for asking), is when OLED screens come down in price to the point where they can be cranked out cheaply. Have you seen those things? I was looking at one in a Sony store, and you actually find yourself doing that thing which the Doctor's New Assistant always does on her first day with the TARDIS. You can't help it. The screen is only about 3mm thick, and most of that appears to be material to keep it rigid. --It's also brighter and crisper than any flat screen today, and the viewing angle question is moot.
I'll trade in my eee1000 when somebody makes a netbook with one of those screens. And maybe not even then. I only stopped using the original keyboard which came with my first PC back in the early Nineties because some of the plastic switches had decomposed beyond functionality. I like to get my money's worth!
-FL
Oh wait. Not First Post. That blip in time came and went and I missed it. I guess I don't exist.
A few points. The first one is that I remember reading a story last week about Quantum Entanglement effects which had been successfully observed acting over a whole meter. Now that's pretty cool. If our species gets that kind of technology up and running correctly, we could probably do away with the silly EM spectrum as a means of broadcast communications altogether in a decade or two. Which would mean that our race will have been broadcasting EM noise into space for less than two centuries or so. Just a blip, really. Our inane first post sent and gone as we move on to making more intelligent comments.
Also, as I'm fond of pointing out, we've been in communications with 'aliens' for quite some time now, but since it doesn't conform to the limited concept of what such a contact is supposed to be like, (according to our best minds in Sci-Fi, bless them), the whole subject is ignored.
There was something else. . .
Right!
They're already here and they've been manipulating humanity for eons. And we're food. And we all know the rule; Don't talk to your food! (Or was it, don't eat with your mouth full?) Whatever. We don't hold communion with cows. --We just breed them from the mighty horned beasts of the plains into dumbed down, obedient, drugged-up tasty bovine snacks who simply don't get that they're food. They live in cubicles, (well the pigs and chickens do, anyway), and they are fed on toxic crap and they don't think for a moment that they're going to be killed and eaten. Heck, if they had the brain tissue required, we'd probably distract them by introducing a bunch of silly stories about cows on crosses or something. --To keep them from open revolt by assuring them that all their woes and daily misery shall be rewarded when the Burger King comes down to 'save' the most righteous of the herd. And blast the rest into oblivion. It doesn't have to make sense. Cows aren't very smart. --Just so long as they don't think too hard or question anything. And believe that flaming bushes are really god and not not some manipulative rancher cattle-prodding them toward the promised land from his hyper-dimensional realm of alien sneakiness.
"As above, so below."
I find it remarkable that people really think that intelligent life would want to reach out and make friends.
Except. . , what is UP with those crop circles? You know; the ones with the magnetic seeds and EM damage which drunk engineering students make without ever being seen in the dead of night with their rope and planks. And, apparently, some means of re-writing genetic plant code so that seeds grow all funny afterward. And making sure the plants don't break, but rather bend at the stalk joint. And that the black helicopters buzz the fields, because the military are just SO fascinated by the doings of drunk pranksters.
But hold on. . , I thought there was no communication. Well, according to the various voices tumbling around space, there's more than one race, more than one state of existence, more than one agenda. And some of them make circles.
But with our tunnel vision so firmly fixed on SETI and a needle-narrow set of galactic possibilities, somehow people are prevented from seeing the messages which are practically shouted at us.
Why? How can it be that many of the same people who argue in defense of Fermi refuse to acknowledge the blatantly obvious? Isn't that a little discordant? Yes! It is. It is discordant, and this is because we're dumb cattle and we believe as we are instructed. --That aliens fly in space ships, are slaves to time, actually want to talk to us and that they'll use walkie talkies to do it. Just Like Us!
Thankfully, not everybody is really that asleep.
-FL
For goodness sake. The Windows 7 beta WAS the second beta release. The first was Vista, except you had to pay for it. --They might have sold enough copies to pay for the brilliant faux-failure Seinfeld campaign which garnered sympathy for Microsoft and has resulted in media praise for this latest OS. (Psyche! 101, that is.)
I remember when Vista first came out, when if you posted anything critical about it, the MS astroturfer goons, (and don't kid yourselves; Slashdot is one of the key fields for that kind of activity), blasted out of the woodwork with nullifications-aplenty. Didn't work very well, but they certainly tried. I remember the bristling you saw when you said, "Vista is a catastrophic failure and MS knows it" before general public opinion had caught up with that notion. The P.R. people don't like you doing that sort of thing while they're still gently voodooing critical mass of whatever mythology they're trying to lock in place.
One of the main reasons MS is shoving Windows 7 out the pipes so quickly, (I suspect), has to do with the fact that the U.S. dollar is on the verge of a total collapse and Bill isn't ready yet to trade in his greenbacks for the "Amero" or whatever they're going to call it. (I wonder how much gold he has stashed away to buy up the new (world order) currency with.) --Whatever the case, the market is dissolving as we speak. Plenty of downtown shop fronts are dark after the failure of Father Christmas to save the day. Gotta sell as many copies as you can of whatever you're selling before people realize that food might possibly be a more important commodity than the latest over-powered notebook surprise.
Everybody has been wishing and hoping to see Microsoft die a miserable, painful death. And now we're going to see it! Too bad we'll have to go hungry in order to have this dear wish fulfilled. But hey, no pain, no. . , well.
The funny part is that even when MS downsizes into a six man operation running out of Gate's garage and offers no customer support, the world will be addled with Russian wormy goodness and nothing to patch up the holes with. What great excuse to shut down the internet so that nobody knows when the Mongol hoards break down the gates of the rotting empire. (Or was it some Germanic barbarians. I can't remember. Those, poor, drunk, lead-poisoned Romans. Not so different today. Have you done a detox recently?)
But that's the bleak view. Perhaps it won't be so bad. Mr. Shuttleworth might just be the right man for the times. I wonder if Adobe will scramble to support Ubuntu. I wonder if gentleman Obama will be able to step up to the plate. He's not all bad. --Despite his Pakistan stance and the whole wire-tap thing, he's got some cool policies brewing. The first president to acknowledge that the U.S. isn't entirely a Christian nation. He gave a tip of the hat to atheists! Holy cow! That's a pretty neat first. So the future is really fuzzy and unpredictable now. How exciting!
But Microsoft is manning the life-rafts. I can't tell if I'm gleeful or not.
-FL
A nice bulb which doesn't spit out a mess of EM garbage and which doesn't add mercury to the local landfill like the much over-hyped CFL's which are guilty on both counts.
Though, I must say, CFL's have come a long way wrt color quality. Though. . , they still feel sort of creepy. --I like what LED technology has done for flashlights, but I'm not sure I'd enjoy living under something which feels like moonlight. I think you need some ambient heat in order to feel comfortable. Sun and Fire have a long love affair with the Human body and its sense organs. When the heat goes out of that relationship, what are you left with?
Call me a sentimentalist.
Sadly, it seems to be just a matter of time before governments outlaw incandescent bulbs. I just love the government; always working hard to serve the people the best way it knows how. You can pretty much bet that whenever governments and industry team up to hard-sell any legislation, you're being screwed in some way not immediately obvious.
-FL
People want to say video games alter people to the point where they are normal one day and killers the next. So to that we say we have played them all our lives and it has no affect on us.
Killing target after target after target doesn't directly make people into trench coat killers, but it normalizes the event to the point where when you hear about such a thing happening in the real world, your automatic reaction is not one of disgust and outrage and a feeling that we must work to decrease violence. It's one of, "Oh. Kill it back".
I'm not saying that automatic reactions are particularly good, but in the context of a world where people are cattle, being able to control how and which way they herd is valuable, especially if you want to keep people locked in a perpetual state of war.
Some of the games being played today by both kids and adults would have been utterly shocking to the world back in the days of Pac Man. This appears to have changed.
you somehow think you are better and more observant than others because you want to think other people are saying all these things don't affect them at all when really you lack contextual reading comprehension skills. In other words, you are being immature and arrogant because you think you know better than everyone else.
Hm. Pardon my own psycho-analysis, but I didn't get that so much. I could be entirely mistaken, but the poster's comment struck me more as being driven by a frustration with mass self-deception rather than an attempt to win ego points in a game of, "I'm The Smartest!". --People locked into that game are more likely to be threatened by any statement of fact coming from a peer.
Whatever the case. . . Answer a falsehood with what it calls for. The truth. If we can do that without trying to 'win' ego points, then we're doing well. It's hard to do. The ego is the gate keeper preventing us from seeing objective reality.
-FL
This struck me as curious as well.
Some have noted that the relative size between human and bacterial cells is different. That makes sense. But still. . ! My first impulse was to look at my body and think, "So my torso, legs, arms, head. . , only 1/10th of that is human? Sure. Pull the other one. Be careful though, according to this article it might come off in your hands like a zombie limb!"
About 10 seconds of Googling informed me that estimates of the number of cells in a human body range all the way from 10 trillion to 100 trillion, (10 to the 14 power), which is on par with the bacteria count noted in the article.
And if that's the case, then it should probably be assumed that the estimates for bacteria count are probably not a chipped in stone thing either, and may indeed be much lower.
So it sounds like a bit of editorial license was being taken in order to punch up the story.
Though, the fact that they're even in the same ball park did take me aback. Hence the term, "Punch Up".
-FL
I really wouldn't be surprised if this group is run partly by people on the inside of the government or Huntington themselves as it seems like its only out to attract violent guerilla types who are willing to carry a pitchfork and a torch at the first possible opportunity.
That's a pretty reasonable assessment. One of the ways civil rights groups in the 60's were combated was to insert agents into groups whose job it was to sow dissent and splintering. Having seen how something as simple as a D&D game can dissolved by the introduction of just one new person who is brought along (because s/he has no friends and wouldn't it be nice to take pity on this difficult person), I have no doubts whatsoever that the larger and much more complex work of organizing a city, state or even country-wide activist group would be vulnerable to this kind of counter-intelligence tactic.
And you can see why. --When people DO manage to gather together into a cohesive and like-minded group which is clear of head-cases, the power to do big things effectively skyrockets. Groups like that could easily alter or even topple governments, so it is no surprise to me that the intelligence community also recognized this and had the problem analyzed, solutions proposed, and money diverted to make it happen.
If counter-intel programs were running forty years ago, why would they have stopped today? Especially with initiatives like the whole Homeland Security nightmare to juice it all up.
-FL
I loved Don Martin's stuff as a kid, but it's aged beyond relevance. Husbands don't come home and hang their business hat, (business hat??) and say, "Honeeeey, I'm Hoooome!" anymore. The whole psychological connection of the strip is lost. It didn't age well.
Spy vs Spy suffers from the same thing. The cold war is OVER. --Once brilliant, that strip is about as relevant and engaging today as Beetle Baily. (Which also once connected with people in a relevant way but which has become meaningless and prosaic.)
The only guy who still has the chops to fit today is Aragones. His "Side Lines" and basic style still shine.
I can't even remember any of the other guys doing stuff in Mad, but the collection of that bunch all at the same place and time was what floated Mad Magazine. The last issue I looked at, a couple of months ago as it happens, was just a bunch of re-tread attempts by no-name artists to copy old formulas.
It read the way the new Kermit sounds. False and without spark or meaning.
Sorry, but artistic collectives must die or change with their creators passing. The only way Mad could shine again would be if they hired on a bunch of luminary geniuses versed in comic observation and satire, (of the Jon Stewart caliber), who also happen to be able to draw in awesome, engaging styles. Not only that, but the editors would have to be willing to allow such new talent to re-invent the whole look of the magazine so that it reflected themselves. --Because anybody willing to copy a dead format and a dead style which last-gasped sometime around the 1980's is certainly not going to be particularly luminary. Any real genius would have been driven mad (ahem) over the restrictions and left asap.
And Intelligent cartoon satire hasn't vanished. There are new guys doing awesome things which don't try to be Kermit, but which are unique and genuinely exciting. XKCZ, for example, is fresh and new and. . , bloody cynical. (Imagine; there was a time when Beetle Baily was just as electric!) The big difference today is that the luminaries aren't all gathered in one convenient place anymore, and certainly not exclusively on paper. You have to go looking. --That's the part which I find most difficult. I enjoyed concentrations of work which I knew everybody else was experiencing. There was something tribal and culture-defining about it which I really drew energy from as a reader. These days, it's easy to feel disconnected.
Thank-goodness for Slashdot, eh?
-FL
What a perfect story for Slashdot!
It plays into all the things people here are most equipped to deal with. That poor teacher is so screwed; the combined resources of a world-wide network of indignant geeks versed up and down in the field of information rights. Could you ask for a better villain to throw such super-powers against?
--Though, I must say, my base-line response to post-secondary education red-tape idiocy is this: Stay the **** out of university! I find whenever friends complain to me of their woes with school administrators and teaching staff, I grind my teeth in annoyance because often the problems seem to me clearly ridiculous, petty and needlessly contrived. People arguing with enormous energy over things which not only don't freaking matter, but which DON'T FREAKING MATTER!! --Case in point: Why would anybody want to fight over a bunch of notes on a subject which, as recent history should have demonstrated by now to everybody on the whole planet, is based on a big, stinking mountain of illusions and utter, complete nonsense?
But I've mellowed over the years.
Have at it!
My response to your teacher, btw, would be this: "I didn't take any notes, you conceited wind-bag. Now get out of my lunch."
Well, okay. Assuming I'd actually taken notes, my response would be, "Are you kidding me? Seriously? This is a joke, right? How did you even get this job? You're a teacher right? What kind of engineering prof doesn't want- Sorry? What? Oh, hell! These cardboard lecture halls all look the same. --I was wondering why it was taking so long to get to gear ratios and other cool stuff. Later alligator!"
-FL
I was just thinking yesterday about how the humble virus had grown. I was wowing over the Amiga 500 my friend's older brother had bought (with his very own money!), when said older brother caught us creeping around in his room.
But instead of tossing us out like the brats we were, he came in and fired it up to show it off to us in a casual display of older-geek coolness I was deeply impressed by. The guy was hard core, heading off to study at MIT in a few months time. The best I'd ever done for geek-cred was to assemble an old Apple II by soldering where the mother board said to soldier without really knowing much about the why or wherefore, so this guy, who had built his own memory circuits on breadboards just to see if he could. . , he seemed like Batman to me. Damn, he was so cool, he even had a *girlfriend* during high school.
So he hung out with us for a while and brought us up to speed on all the coolest things going down in the world of geek lore, one item of which was that there was such a thing as the, "Computer Virus".
The concept seemed utterly sci-fi to me, and it caught my imagination like a torch. I remember wandering home with a multiplying flow-chart of possibilities developing in my mind, all leading to. . , well today actually.
The funny thing is that whenever the 'future' does happen to show up, it always seems to feel suspiciously like another bland variation of 'today', --and it never contains flying cars or Harrison Ford running around looking wounded and armed and trench-coaty. For some reason, no matter how I envision the future, it always involves imagery from Blade Runner. Either that, or the Happy Ending from one of those Sid Meyer games.
I guess we're lucky both ways.
Cheers!
-FL
"Echelon."
This NSA business is a side show. Of COURSE we are being spied on. We've always been spied on. This is only a debate with those who have short memories or denial issues.
It's as though people live in two separate universes but only pay attention to one of them because the other one is just too upsetting. Doesn't make it go away, though.
I was talking with a friend a couple of weeks back, and she asked me a question about something, so I answered it. She looked alarmed and upset and flew into accusations and anger and stormed away. This surprised me because I didn't think what we were talking about was even terribly interesting. It was old, old news for me.
Then the other day she phoned up and apologized. Seems she checked it out on her own and grudgingly verified the answer I'd offered her. I told her it was okay, and that it was easy for me to forget that this stuff is upsetting when you first learn about it. Scary and life-altering, and a very real option is to just block it out and pretend that everything is as we are told it is. Heck, even with Echelon, I went through a state of fear when I first learned about it and who was involved and why it was happening. But that story broke years ago now, and it was old even then. It's easy to forget that people find comfort in a continuity of reality, even if it is a false one, and that this is often why they reject new ideas.
-FL
If you are innocent, then you have nothing to worry about. That's a pretty wise assessment.
And by saying that, you just lost the right to be taken seriously.
I mean, that's right up there with, "I was just following orders."
How out of touch does a person have to be to not know this stuff? Seriously. Google for it. It's not complicated. --And frankly, it ought to be covered around the same time as street crossing safety tips and telephone etiquette.
-FL
There is no need to inject partisan politics into this issue. Each individual congressperson (democrat or republican) bears responsiblilty for the lack of oversight in this matter.
Thank-you for nipping that one in the bud so succinctly. It's far too easy to slip into old response patterns. Divide and conquer is a popular tactic because it works. It takes clarity of mind to overcome our garden variety pre-conditioning.
-FL
I hear you. But I also think that the problem with trying to work within a system to fight corruption of the system itself is largely pointless once the corruption reaches a critical mass. Eventually, you just have to say, "No" to the actors in lab coats with their authority-endowing clip boards who instruct you to increase the voltage and shock the actor strapped in the chair. Because sometimes, usually, it's not just a disturbing university social-studies experiment. The sad truth today is that official organs have become systems with the primary purpose of keeping populations enslaved, largely ignorant of the fact, and content to just go with it. --Or to be confounded when the official channels of complaint become too convoluted to be of any use, thus using up all the available energy of the complainant and leaving him or her with the feeling, "Oh well, at least I tried." The end result, as appears to be the case with you, is to simply get back to work, secure in the knowledge that you did your best. And nothing changes. A safety valve for dealing with people who have a glimmer of awareness and fight in them.
Our trust and reliance on the system to protect us, as well as our perceived duty to be loyal to that system is taught by the system itself during our youth when we are at our most trusting and our minds at their most vulnerable to manipulations from which many never recover enough to even fully recognize have even occurred. There comes a time when you have to screw up the courage and do that which is right, because secrecy is very often there primarily to protect the perps. --As is certainly the case with spying on the public.
Also, you must be cautious. When you say, "I stand by what I said," that standing is very much like the statement itself, one bound up with a notion of honor and duty to a system which hates and fears its subjects. Honor and duty are not bad things in and of themselves, but with the appropriate conditioning, they become facets of the personality which are easily redirected into empowering the corruption.
It's very easy to take offense and for the ego to scream and yell when such ideas are pointed out, but understanding our world cannot be achieved when valid notions become things to fight against for fear of 'being wrong'. This is usually what keeps people from progressing. Fear of feeling wrong. The aggression and ridicule which is so rampant on this very site is another programmed response. Geeks get it the worst, I suspect because they are generally more aware and capable of dealing with thought problems. As such, they suffer from the deepest programming, and you can see it in their reactions. I've seen spittle fly and eyes roll around like those of frightened horses when discussing benign facts and ideas. This is not rational behavior, and it comes from somewhere. All of it is yet another aspect of the control system built into use through our childhood experiences with schooling.
Objective reality is all that counts. The rest is a trap.
Cheers!
-FL
I've never seen such a bunch of sappy losers as the characters in BSG.
Reinforcing the lie, "Life is sad, random and mean and you can't do anything about it. Now go wallow obsessively in your misery." Random, my ass! --Heck, it's a world where when you have the audacity to celebrate even the smallest event, (your 100th flight), a freekin' missile 'randomly' chooses that moment to go off and destroy you and the moral of your entire crew. What bullshit! When event after event like that occurs, it's not random at all. It's deliberately sought out misery disguised as "Reality" Oooh, BSG is so real! It's just like life!
Stories carry a message, and BSG's message is one of despair. The Earth just happens to be a bombed out, radioactive ruin? Oh yeah. That doesn't break pattern, does it? Even if life were a series of random events, which it isn't, then BSG is still giving a false image.
The question is this: Why? Who benefits from broadcasting misery and despair into the heads of all the smart people who are responsible for engineering the infrastructure of our world?
Stupid, stupid rat creatures.
-FL
We can fix two of those 3 big problems today.
Well, maybe not in one day, but certain much faster than people have been trained to think. Government is hopelessly complex, and this is by design, I think, to keep people gridlocked into place.
After all, solving problems would amount to letting all the human livestock leave their pens. --And this is quite literally true as per one of your examples!
-FL
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I do find myself feeling increasingly dubious about Obama, based on his actions thus far.
I'm a storyteller so I like to understand people's motivations. I have lots of trouble believing a story when I can't understand someone's motivation.
Very sensible. The problem is that motivations are like sound waves. There are lots of them out there, but only some will resonate with a given receiver. We don't really know what kind of receiver Obama is. Not yet, anyway, but there are indications. We've seen in his choice of appointments some counter-intuitive, if not outright bad picks. We've seen his reaction to the Israeli conflict. Through his comments about Hugo Chavez, we've gotten a small taste of his foreign policy wrt South America. None of these things are unforgivable, and people are quick to create logical justifications on his behalf. There is always the chance he is simply playing his cards close to his chest while consolidating a position of power so that when the time comes, he will be able to make bold moves with assurance. Kennedy was in bed with the Mob before he was able to move more freely in government, for goodness sake. But still. . . It's been raising eyebrows.
1) Why would he lie about all of the change he wants to bring about? What's in it for him to lie? He's wealthy. He has as much power as can be attained. He has a reputation to keep if he wants more money and power.
There are so many reasons here which can be borrowed from to answer that. Everything from psychopathy and Manchurian Candidate stuff, to simple idealism rebuffed by too big a counter force and not enough courage on his part. Do you indict Bush and Co. for war crimes when you know that 4 - 8 years down the road the GOP could turn around like the bunch of school yard egoists we saw evidenced in the McCain camp and do the same thing? Safer to not rock the boat. Do you go head to head with the Zionists by avoiding conflict in Iran? Do you attempt to tackle the root of the money problem? Bill Hicks put it well when he said, "I think after a new president is sworn in, they take him and put him in a small room deep underground. Then a screen rolls down, and they play the Kennedy Assassination for him, but it's footage nobody has ever seen, from a completely new camera angle. Then the screen rolls up, and they say, 'Do we have an understanding?'" --Simple fear could make a liar out of him. But again, we'd need to know what kind of receiver we're dealing with. We don't yet.
2) Why wouldn't he want to fix the economy? He does have a re-election coming up in ... 4 years. It's in his best interest to do whatever it takes to improve the economy.
Fixing the economy can only be done in one way. Changing the source of money. Right now, all money in the U.S., and indeed, the entire industrialized world, is borrowed at interest from a small consortium of private bankers. Very simply, to pay back that money plus interest, you need more money than exists, because all money comes from the same source. When the world defaults, as it inevitably must every 100 years or so, the banks scoop up all the collateral; land and holdings. The current banking system is deliberately set up in this manner for one reason: Power. Barak is no fool. He knows this, as anybody with real brains in government does, but he's never mentioned it. Kennedy tried to deal with this problem through the issuance of real government dollars which were minted at zero interest. After he was killed, this policy was quietly snuffed. If Barak doesn't face down this same problem, then he is just playing along to the real powers that be, which makes him just the top slave. But it's too early to judge. Maybe he'll do something about it.
3) Nobody wants an end to the war on terror. We just want it to be fought pragmatically... by first up actually fighting terrorists instead of invading secular despot nations. Fighting terror means u
It all feels like a damned "Who" song.
I remember a European journalist describing the population's reaction to corruption in government. He said, (and I'm paraphrasing because I cannot find the quote), "People know the government is putting on a facade, that beneath it lies fascism. But they allow this, because they've seen what overt fascism looks like, they've lived through it, and they cry, 'No, anything but that! Anything but that!'"
-FL
No, no. He's got it all wrong.
"Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey."
-FL
I would have modded you up a point, but there was no, "+1 Awesome!"
-FL
I've pointed this out before, but I'll do it again because I think it's an excellent example of how mind-control works. (And how smart people who strive to be media savvy are by no means outside the box of rats. --That is, it doesn't matter how smart you are, if you fail to analyze everything, then even a clever person becomes little more than a simple regime of thought patterns which can be solved for and sold to.)
The Seinfeld campaign wasn't a failure at all. --The current positive media hype about Windows 7 is the the direct result of the Seinfeld campaign. Those 300 million dollars firmly planted two things. . .
1. Gates had gone walkabout, leaving the keys with the moron who came up with Vista. Microsoft isn't Microsoft without the boy genius. Oh, and he's back to work on Windows 7. (Whether this is true or not isn't important. It's the media impression, which is all that matters.)
2. Gates is an awkward, non-charismatic computer genius geek who failed hard-core on broadcast television and we all felt SORRY for him and really want him to succeed next time. (When was the last time anybody felt sorry for gates?)
The PR company which was hired to rescue Microsoft wasn't going to be some slouch company. It will be the kind of place which hires prodigies whose bread and butter is hacking brain code. They're laughing at you right now.
-FL
The thing which made Bebop great was the larger story-line. The unfolding of the various characters as they healed themselves, or resolved their personal/emotional issues. That's what good sci-fi does these days. --Watch some of the old and loved Doctor Who episodes. The ones we (well some of 'we') thought were so great back when we were kids. By today's standards, they're amazingly FLAT; all about the plot and the cleverness and the adventure, but zero examination of the emotional dimension. These days, people are well acclimated to the science, (or whatever you want to call it). --Exploring that stuff is no longer the point of these stories. The thing we don't get, however, and which we are so driven from an instinctive level to explore is how we emotionally fit within these new concepts. The alternate realities and the high-tech wilderness of it all. People want to know how it feels to be human in an expanded set of possibilities. Emotions matter now. How cool is that?
--I mean, heck, look at the last couple of Bond movies, for goodness sake! 007 has a soul??? --He's a broken man with plenty of murder/lockpick skills, which yeah, we were all dazzled by in the 60's and 70's, but how did he get that way? Turns out, he's deeply messed up and needs a matronly M to keep his threads all tied up from unraveling. --When the question of James Bond's mental stability even crosses the public mind, you know we are living in a new era!
But to explore emotions properly in a story, you need space. Or rather, length. Emotions aren't like car chases; on one moment, off the next. It takes time for lives to unfold and relationships to evolve. Bebop, and Firefly, and Doctor Who needed a dozen or more episodes for these issues to be properly explored. You can't achieve some of the really great moments we saw in those series in a 90 minute format. Not easily, anyway. --They already made a Cowboy Bebop movie. It looked and sounded fantastic. I still listen to some of the tracks now and again. But compared to the lower budget TV series, it was listless and redundant. It was the series which sang!
Same with, "Serenity", which I know is well-loved among fan circles, but my feeling is that the popular reaction came more from the grassroots victory it represented over FOX's short-sighted cancellation of the series than it did from the movie actually being particularly great. It was clever, painfully violent, and tried to cram too much into too little, and when it ended, I was relieved and I didn't miss any of the characters. It was the series which truly studied relationships and the concept of, "Found Family"; that's what made it good. Some of the most powerful moments came with revelations of character which had been building to a crescendo for ages. --When Jane was locked outside the ship, and Mal was going to let him die for being a psychotic monster but changed his mind when Jane demonstrated that he had a semblance of a conscience. Stuff like that is gold, and I just don't think it's within the realm of likelihood that we're going to see anything resembling that in a film. Not in any meaningful way. And certainly not with a wooden post like Keanu Reeves.
Ironically, the problem is that Spike, while being the, 'Strong Silent type', was also a bit of a cheeky bugger with a lot of iron and self-confidence, whereas Keanu has never struck me as having known himself. Always a bit dreamy and confused. Poor, poor casting. --Because, I don't really believe much in, 'acting'; the eyes and unconscious, uncontrollable expressions of a person always come through the actor whether they like it or not.
The Bebop series was a great anime, and I'm as much a sucker fanboy as the next guy, so I'll probably plunk down my. . . Jeez how much does it cost to see a film these days? Well, I'll plunk that down just to see the thing. But, honestly, it would be foolish to expect much.
Heck, I'm still trying to figure out what the heck is going to happen with that Toby McGuire Macross project.
Erk.
-FL
The crystals and incense folk call this, "Mercury Retrograde", and in the case of Astrology, they're actually on fairly firm ground.
Communications and technology become jumbled and fragile in these periods. Global slowdowns and best laid plans going to pot.
Watch the patterns. One of my favorites was when those 5 undersea cables got cut and the world flipped out.
Happens twice a year for about twenty days each period. Back up your stuff before these times hit. Or just yell until you're blue, "Correlation does not equal causation!" --Which is actually quite true. Mercury isn't out there with bolt cutters. It's just a means of measuring the weather patterns of reality. This period ends Feb 1st. It's generally a good idea to hold off on signing anything important or buying any new hardware until after that date.
It's not just radioactive isotopes wobbling in their decay rates in time with the Earth's orbit. Everything is affected. --There are fundamentals of matter and energy, from which consciousness arises, which are not yet properly understood by modern science, and so we have to rely on the old-wive's rosemary-smelling almanacs for guidance. I suspect if the scientific community ever got over it's understandable knee-jerk over-reaction to the stupidity of religion and actually managed to work out the mechanics behind the observations, we'd zoom ahead by lightyears in our understanding of physics.
But the problem is that the "Must Not Offend Popular Consensus Even if it's Wrong" instinct affects scientists and laymen alike.
Ah well. We'll get there one day. I hope.
Cheers!
-FL