Just to be clear, when I said, "And if everybody had cared enough from the outset, I'm sure we could have built a far better system which respected the creatures who feed us as they deserve." I of course intended it to be taken that respect was deserved.
You bring up some valid points and your insight is an appreciated antidote to a poorly executed article.
But (putting GM feed aside), there remains one big aspect about factory farms I cannot get past...
Are the animals experiencing a quality of life which doesn't include standing around in shit?
Then they are no longer animals. They are active meat cultures. They may not be stressed, but I know plenty of fat idiots who are generally not stressed either and their lives are also pathetic compared to free range humans. When driving past factory chicken farms, the air for a mile in every direction is filled with the stench of hell. Life existing the center of that hell may not be overly stressed, but it's still not the right place for living things. And I do imagine that egg laying chickens stacked in boxes, despite any efforts to mitigate their stress levels don't experience what one might call "sanguine" lives. Same goes for milking cows to a lesser degree, but only because you can't stack ruminants.
I know this doesn't fit well into the question, "Well, how do you propose we feed all these people?" While there are better ways, better diets, and better means for managing populations of both humans and farm animals, the fact remains, we are where we are and it isn't pretty.
So what can I do? Well, I eat free range and I know my farmers and I've met the herds and the birds. I'm satisfied that I'm not contributing unduly to lousy lives among our fellow creatures occupying this world. Can this scale up to meet the present needs of the planet? I doubt it. We're pretty much screwed as a population. But that doesn't mean I have to play along. I'm not going to cause needless misery and degradation if I can avoid it. And if everybody had cared enough from the outset, I'm sure we could have built a far better system which respected the creatures who feed us as they deserve.
There's a ton of bad karma being generated and it will need to be paid back eventually. It always is.
was the encryption scheme weaker, or were disgruntled RIM employees more willing to hand over the keys than disgruntled apple employees?
I was going to say something about some secret service handing them over in the interests of further locking down the public in fear-mode in order to justify the sale of more human rights at fire-sale prices. After all, we've been primed with several bits of knowledge, (Obama uses a Blackberry! Russians Under The Bed are back in vogue!).
I mean, doesn't the CIA (or whoever) require a backdoor key? Don't they have the technology to break any public encryption at will? Of course they do!
This is all about population culling. That's what this phony war on terror is all about. Ramming this awful police state into place asap. Do you think they're not going to USE that police state? Of course they are. Those empty camps aren't going to be empty much longer.
Jeez. When Jon Stewart has obviously been cowed into submission, you know the end is near.
You know, given that reviews are supposed to be reviews of the MOVIE in question and not rants about amazon's business tactics (even if they're rants that are factually accurate), I don't think this is actually a bad thing.
Well. . , sheesh, you still review the film. Plenty of reviews there make reference to other reviews. In any case, what's worse? A bunch of fake reviews which deliberately try to mislead you, or a criticism of the fact that you're being misled?
Amazon is selling the IMDb as a marketing tool to Hollywood.
How?
Astro-turfing in the reviews section of the IMDb is not just allowed, (and I suspect, sold as a service to big film releases), but when you write a review pointing this out, that criticism vanishes. Or rather, it doesn't vanish, but only appears present to the IP address it came from while remaining invisible to the rest of the world.
Give it a try!
Next time a big block buster release comes out, head over to the IMDb in the first couple of days of release and after wading through the swamp of 10 star rave reviews, down to the bottom where the balanced reviews by real people are buried, and write your own pointing out that Amazon is selling favorable reviews to Hollywood marketing firms and that the movie in question probably sucks just badly enough to require the kind of manipulative push an astro-turfing tactic offers.
What I was saying, if you bothered to think about my post instead of immediately looking for what is wrong with it, is if you apply occam's razor, chances are it isn't aliens.
The problem is that Occam's razor is improperly understood and often used as a casual dismissal in lieu of more challenging thought exercises.
The basic misuse of Occam I see occurs when people measure what they believe may or may not be more likely based on incomplete knowledge and pre-existing biases. For example, when Alexander Graham Bell announced to the world that he could send voices down thin copper wire, there was outrage. I remember reading a large essay from a news archive, published in a big, respected paper of the day, complete with illustrations and accurate maths, stating that it was impossible for voices to carry down metal tubes of the diameter Bell was using in his experiments. -The sceptics of the day were thinking about the known models for voice transfer through tubes, commonly used on ships, and so in their eyes, had they applied Occam's Razor, they would pulled up a negative result because their knowledge structure at that time did not include electricity in the way Bell was using it.
This is the problem with Occam. Its users rely on self-referential data and known quantities to establish probability.
When one explores sufficiently the vast wells of data available regarding UFOs and similar, Occam's Razor cuts in the other direction.
That's an excellent point, so long as you maintain the ability to cross borders and get out of the trade-collapse zone. Travel is hard if you're hungry. Heck, basic rational thought is hard if you're hungry.
But it's true; we've not experienced in recent centuries a world-wide collapse scenario. So long as one or two industrialized countries manage to maintain stability, then that would allow other countries to open trade relations and slowly get back on their feet. -If, that is, everybody plays nice.
There's lots of gold and silver and other precious metals and resources in third world countries, but they remain hell-holes through one means or another, sometimes repression on the global stage, other times through sheer momentum of existing situations.
I suppose clever, well-informed and determined individuals will be able to maneuver themselves through hazards even as vast as a new ice age. The equatorial regions generally stay warm enough for agriculture during dark ages. But curiously, whole populations stuck it out in the mud in the past. Though this time, there is greater knowledge and infrastructure available to facilitate maneuvering. And much greater police and military forces in place to make damned certain this doesn't happen.
Those global elites are quite aware of the situation unfolding, and they will be wanting the nice sunny beaches to themselves, and perhaps a few million slaves to do the work, but no more.
Gold is only useful if you can hang on to it and survive the years between total collapse and the rebuilding of a new world.
Generally, gold is seized by whatever autocrats and strong-men are vying for power in the interim. In any case, during the hungry years, nobody has any use for gold.
But what's interesting this time around is that we're entering an age where canned goods are stable and good for years. We've never been through a societal collapse which has had access to high-quality, preserved goods.
Whatever. Skill sets are more important in the long run. Can you farm or make useful things? What value do you personally hold? Do people like you?
Keep in mind that the three major religions (and a fair number of minor ones) all have the same origin. So these "coincidences" are of the form of easily explained cause and effect. Further, it's vanishingly small chance that we'd have this particular group dominating world religions (if we could somehow restart human civilization from scratch a bunch of times), but some set of religions would be there. That turns the observation into an insignificant one.
I wasn't presenting the current volatile setup of religions as proof of hyperdimensional tinkering. Rather I was suggesting that it is an end result of tinkering we have been told has taken place if certain working theories are accepted. Can it be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt? No. But then you can't prove that anything exists outside the room you are in while you are inside it. 'Proof' is a matter of reaching agreement using certain base assumptions, which we make and agree are reasonable despite our ability to actually prove them. No scientist can ever prove that s/he actually exists or that the world is not a dream, so a base assumption we work from is to simply accept this paradox and move on. It's the base assumptions which are in question, and those need to be built up from elemental blocks to provide the workings of a belief system.
One of the base elements I accept is that communication with aliens is on-going through channeling experiments. (And through which it has been described that history is regularly tampered with.) This base element assumption, (that of communication with aliens or that channeling works as advertised), must be examined and broken down into pieces which must be accepted or not accepted on the weight of smaller bits of observation which, if they don't break down logically, serve that end. Since most of that discussion falls outside the accepted parameters of common science, such assumptions remain off the table for most people and so the claim that "History is regularly tampered with" has nothing to back it up in terms of acceptable proof. An exploration of non-orthodox assumptions, and a personal sifting and logical analysis is required before one can proceed.
Interestingly, when one does take the time to explore this stuff, the weight of the many types of observation and supporting observation does build up quite quickly into a body of work which is hard to ignore, but many will never take the time to step outside the boundaries of official science, and so will never gain the observations required to move ahead.
One of the things we have been told is that this, (the nature of official knowledge), like the state of religion, is also arranged by design in order to prevent people from learning about their predicament.
As to the rest of your claims, you need evidence. What I mean by that is facts or observations that can distinguish between your tale and mundane explanations (like a heaping lot of wishful thinking). For example, 120 eye witnesses to UFOs in the nuclear weapons program?
Why 120? Is that a magic number where witness testimony is suddenly reliable? Of course not, and I'm not suggesting that you believe it to be so. But it does raise an interesting point. The more observers agree on an observation, the more ready we are to accept it.
As it happens, there are FAR more than 120 witnesses to UFO related events. Richard Dolan, (look him up), took the time to research and document events taken only from multiple witness accounts where the witnesses were pilots, police officers, military officers and various other people occupying positions of authority requiring them to document their observations and maintain a serious, rational state of mind. Often there are accompanying recordings in the form of radar records, film from gun cameras on aircraft and similar. The weight of this body of evidence is enough for some people to start taking the next steps toward agreeing upon acce
Yeah, actually we shot it on a Tuesday afternoon because the weekend would have been mayhem. A lot of the shops had no camera policies so Patrick filmed it all on his D-SLR hung at stomach level so that he just looked like a tourist rather than someone filming footage.
You know, I wondered about that. Everybody you ran into seemed so totally un-obsessed with camera fear that I thought, "Sheesh, maybe Japanese retail vendors are simply happier and less paranoid than everybody in the West?" The camera work was good enough for me to think that it wasn't being done on the sly. Nice job! -Oh, and of course, all your dialogue would have seemed normal to anybody witnessing because they would have simply thought it was being directed to your 'tourist' friend. What a clever set-up!
-Except for that robot shop; they seemed pretty happy to turn it into an impromptu sales pitch.
A video catalog of the various shops in a tinkerer's paradise!
That was an awesome little tour. I think every city has a few electronic parts stores, but I've never seen anything so extensive or well-categorized. I seem to recall a lot more cardboard bins and chaos. The thing which surprised me the most was that it wasn't shoulder-to-shoulder madness. I've been in cities with a lot fewer people and you barely move around in shops like that, but in Japan (of all places), there was permanently enough room not just to navigate but to have a camera man follow you around also.
Maybe it was just early on a week day. Or perhaps that's just what happens when you spread everything out and have more of it.
What a fun video repository, though. Made me feel like a kid again!
A stalker hangs outside your house then pounces you with, "I've been watching you!" as if your front porch were simply on his route home.
Yeah, that's actually kind of paranoid. Maybe get some sunshine and fresh air?
You are a stalker and a hypocrite, a stereotypical sort who preaches selflessness while providing his name twice in his missives, a proto-troll who begins with a hyper-politically correct invective asserting that good grammar is a sign of compassion and rounds off his rhetorical Happy Meal by suggesting that the other house is a "retard".
Calling "Asperger's" is any different? And I'm the hypocrite? At least I was being fair.
But you know what? You win. I don't have the energy to spare. So please, believe whatever you will.
Yes I am sure they have. All I was doing was making a point while in the middle of my class on the Sociology of Deviant Behavior so I apologize that it was not up to your high standards. But just a hint, when posting try not to sound like a pompous ass. Just for your information, I am a member of Mensa.
You were writing with dismissive arrogance on a subject you didn't know anything about and I was responding appropriately. Actually, I was being quite nice about it, given the social norms of this forum.
I would ask, "Why are people so easily offended when it is pointed out that they don't know something?" but I already know the answer. -And it's many times worse when you happen to be crammed among high IQs competing for the little scraps of love and respect handed down to the smartest kids in class.
but it puzzles me that the CIA/whoever could successfully cover UFO stories up for decades, while failing to prevent stuff like Abu Ghraib from coming out within a few months of it happening.
What's so puzzling?
There's tons of information out there, photographs, accounts, dead cows, crop circles. . . Has been for years.
The fact of the matter is that people have been trained to ignore that which the talking heads on TV have not sanctified with the wand of authoritative recognition and acceptance into "Official Reality".
It's true that you can't keep a secret. There are always leaks. However, you CAN keep the public from wanting to look or think about that secret. It's quite easy, actually. You just say, "X is uncool. Only losers think about X." We didn't go to school to learn math and science. We wen to school to learn our social programming.
It's the genius of mind-control.
Seriously; the particular group of people in this story have been around for quite a few years now, speaking the same message about UFOs. The only difference is that the news media looks like it consider validating them. That's the only thing which has changed.
That people's filters can be so immediately altered with such a subtle shift speaks volumes about how terribly programmed our society is.
It would be pathetic if it weren't also so very dangerous.
That's nice except that the "know what they are talking about" crowd probably has zero intersection with humanity.
I don't know if you meant this facetiously or not, but there is some truth to that. Compare the honors engineering graduate to the average Walmart shopper whose knowledge is soundly based on Fox News, and how much awkwardness there would be if you place one in a party of the other's choosing, (in either direction).
Same thing here, but more so, especially considering that increasing awareness in these directions includes learning how humans function. After a certain point, it becomes hard to not see other people as relatively simple machines, constantly going through the same automatic routines which they mistake for real thought and free will. (The solution is recognizing that everybody is on a learning curve which we must all go through, and being encouraging rather than impatient. But it's a helluva trick at times.)
My view is that there could be supernatural things, which could be sentient in some sense, but their interaction with our universe has to respect the rules of the universe, that is, maintain the "illusion". That includes such things as casualty, the ordering of time as we see it.
If your time line had been altered thousands of times so that your existence was trained to grow in a certain direction, like a vine or bonsai tree, how would you recognize that this was happening? The closest we get to an awareness of this is the experience of Deja Vu, which can in some instances indicate a significant point of choosing visited numerous times before and recognized on a soul level. Causality is only a problem with time travel in the "Back to the Future" sense, which is not the issue here since that's not how it works.
Since there is no time, and it's all just a matter of the world being manipulated along the axis we experience as 'time', then no action can break any rules of causality. (That's a mouthful. Sorry. Let me put it this way: To a two-dimensional creature, it would appear that we can perform magic, but we're not breaking any rules by manipulating objects in the 3rd dimension. The same holds true one step up the awareness ladder. Causality is automatically self-regulating).
Though coincidences can certainly seem to pile up. --It's awfully convenient, for instance, that the three major religions happen to be rigged the way they are.
Perhaps it is not genetics that is the problem, but the limits of the imposed illusion of time?
Our perception of time is the direct result of our genetic make-up.
The way I think of it is this...
1. You existed five minutes ago. 2. You exist now. 3. Your brain took in information from both those moments and all the intervening ones. It just happens to process that information in serial rather than parallel.
Genetics of a higher order capable of parallel processing of incoming information would offer a wildly different perception of reality. Time travel would not have anything to do with wormholes and such, but rather simply the focusing of attention on your body ten years ago the same way you might focus on your finger rather than your shoulder.
In any case, paranoia is only paranoia when it isn't based on anything. I'm not making this stuff up out of thin air.
The fact of the matter is that this group of high-ranking witnesses has been around for several years now, pumping this same line. If you know where to find them, then sure, they've got a lot of fascinating notes to share. But the media has ignored them.
The interesting thing now is that this is receiving actual main-stream attention with the possibility of official acknowledgment. Now THAT'S spooky. It means somebody, somewhere is planning something. You don't turn on that big a switch in the public mind without wanting to get something out of it on the other side.
Consider; this same week, a new and high production-value TV program aired called, "The Event" just aired. It's also about aliens and conspiracies and government cover-ups. Reuters and Hollywood are simply output pipes on the same media machine and the timing for this kind of social engineering is impeccable given that the planet is about to start freezing and starving. I'm noticing other similar trends in the societal mind share on this topic.
Something is definitely up. Whether it is going to be a bait & switch kind of maneuver designed to lock down thinking patters, (like the fake moon landing con), or if it is simply time to wake people up to new masters or whatever. . , who the heck knows?
Seriously? This is ridiculous. While I'm sure aliens exist somewhere light years away. 2 things come to mind. 1 Why the hell do we feel so important that other species would want to come and bother us and 2 its probably some terrestrial experiment, probably designed to destroy nukes.
Your assumptions are hopelessly under-informed. Smarter people than you have asked those obvious questions and have spent years hunting through the paper work to determine their answers.
You could do very well for yourself by looking at the results of their research so that you don't have to do the big hunt on your own.
Don't feel too bad; 90% of the eye-rollingly silly remarks made here are just as ill-informed. It seems to be a common fall-back position when new information is made available which upsets the orthodoxy. People grasp.
As it stands, if these reports reflect a true phenomena, let's say, Greys conducting covert reconnaissance of the Earth for some reason, then why screw around with the most militarily sensitive spots on the planet? What do they gain from that activity over decades which balances the risk of getting caught? The thing is that there's a certain sloppiness to the UFOs in these stories. They're visible, they do stuff that's likely to get powerful organizations riled up, and there's the risk of technology falling into relatively capable hands.
Think of it this way; it's not the U.S. overflying a bunch of cavemen. It's the U.S. overflying a bunch of mice. The prevailing thought among people who know what they are talking about, is that this is not a nuts & bolts activity and that aliens are not confined to traveling through time the way we do; they exist in a different state where the illusion of time simply isn't there. There's about as much danger from us unraveling their technology as there is of cows learning how to work the tractor. We don't have the genetic capability or awareness.
Screwing with a missile silo might be on par with curiously poking an ant war with a stick. Our own government would cover it up simply because it is unacceptable for us to feel unsafe or that there is an enemy out there which simply cannot be fought, negotiated or bargained with.
One of the basic items which comes up when you dig deep enough is that we are food; anxiety, pain and high emotion provide a type of energy which can be consumed and that the human race has been bred up into the billions, history has been sculpted for the end purpose of drawing off this energy in one vast harvest.
It's hard to grasp, but while we require physical food, we can also certainly consume this same energetic stuff in a limited way; think of popularity cliques in schools. People feel good when they bully others; it's an energetic transfer and this on higher levels of reality apparently offers substantial benefit. There's a reason we've been gradually tuning ourselves racially to not just accept things like torture and warfare, but to crave it.
Oh, you're just one of those creepy stalkers who encounters someone on the Internet with more than one opinion he doesn't like and splatters with the crudest strokes an e-psychological diagnosis to summarily dismiss opposing ideas.
Stalker? Ha ha! Don't flatter yourself. I simply pay attention to all the many thousands of things I read and tend to have a good memory. Trust me. You are not important. I know, it's probably asking the impossible for you to recognize that. Comparing yourself to Turing. . ? Oh dear! (And for the record, I have no problem with gays. I DO have problems with sociopaths and assholes, though.)
But if you want to clean up your act, you might try saying fewer thoughtless things and take the time to ensure your grammar doesn't make you sound like a retard.
Worked up? No. Just observing you, pointing out patterns and asking questions.
You might ask yourself why you find that so upsetting.
And it wasn't a mis-placed apostrophe. It was garbled weirdness of a high order and the particular brand of justification you used, among several other things and general observation over time. Basically, the bubble version of your reality is vastly different from the real one which everybody else can see.
Mirror, mirror. . .
You're not even picking your own words, reflecting back at me the same phraseology and style of communication I was using, (though the bitterness is your own special addition). This is also typical of the sociopathic individual. They have no personality of their own, and so they reflect those around them out of basic instinct, typically because the unknowing observer is then able to see his or herself in the sociopath, making detection less likely.
Again, just observing some known facts about sociopaths. I'm not judging you. As I said before, you might just be a regular asshat.
Dragon NaturallySpeaking is sufficiently accurate that I don't even bother to check what it has transcribed any more, allowing me to rant at leisure while reading something else.
When it makes a mistake, I always have Asperger's sufferers to point it out for the benefit of everyone else.
I can't tell if this is standard narcissistic behavior or just basic ass-hattery. --This being an example of a person who lives so soundly inside a personal bubble reality that it doesn't even think it is necessary to go to the trouble of communicating correctly in order to believe that its thoughts are understood by the rest of the world; after all, why put in the effort since the universe and all of its contents are already a simple extension of its own ego? Babies exist for a period where there is no division between the "I" and the rest of the universe. In sociopaths, conditions exist which prevent the natural growth period of the brain into a state of natural separation where it is recognized that there is more than just the self.
This separation is required if compassion is to emerge. Those without compassion would not bother trying to communicate clearly. Who cares, after all about anybody else? The only reason to communicate clearly is in order to manipulate those peculiar "others" out there as though they were toys.
But of course, when the universe looks on at this broken behavior and points out that the ego in question is seriously mistaken in its assumptions, the reaction is abusive.
Slashdot Mirror
Just to be clear, when I said, "And if everybody had cared enough from the outset, I'm sure we could have built a far better system which respected the creatures who feed us as they deserve." I of course intended it to be taken that respect was deserved.
-FL
You bring up some valid points and your insight is an appreciated antidote to a poorly executed article.
But (putting GM feed aside), there remains one big aspect about factory farms I cannot get past...
Are the animals experiencing a quality of life which doesn't include standing around in shit?
Then they are no longer animals. They are active meat cultures. They may not be stressed, but I know plenty of fat idiots who are generally not stressed either and their lives are also pathetic compared to free range humans. When driving past factory chicken farms, the air for a mile in every direction is filled with the stench of hell. Life existing the center of that hell may not be overly stressed, but it's still not the right place for living things. And I do imagine that egg laying chickens stacked in boxes, despite any efforts to mitigate their stress levels don't experience what one might call "sanguine" lives. Same goes for milking cows to a lesser degree, but only because you can't stack ruminants.
I know this doesn't fit well into the question, "Well, how do you propose we feed all these people?" While there are better ways, better diets, and better means for managing populations of both humans and farm animals, the fact remains, we are where we are and it isn't pretty.
So what can I do? Well, I eat free range and I know my farmers and I've met the herds and the birds. I'm satisfied that I'm not contributing unduly to lousy lives among our fellow creatures occupying this world. Can this scale up to meet the present needs of the planet? I doubt it. We're pretty much screwed as a population. But that doesn't mean I have to play along. I'm not going to cause needless misery and degradation if I can avoid it. And if everybody had cared enough from the outset, I'm sure we could have built a far better system which respected the creatures who feed us as they deserve.
There's a ton of bad karma being generated and it will need to be paid back eventually. It always is.
-FL
was the encryption scheme weaker, or were disgruntled RIM employees more willing to hand over the keys than disgruntled apple employees?
I was going to say something about some secret service handing them over in the interests of further locking down the public in fear-mode in order to justify the sale of more human rights at fire-sale prices. After all, we've been primed with several bits of knowledge, (Obama uses a Blackberry! Russians Under The Bed are back in vogue!).
I mean, doesn't the CIA (or whoever) require a backdoor key? Don't they have the technology to break any public encryption at will? Of course they do!
This is all about population culling. That's what this phony war on terror is all about. Ramming this awful police state into place asap. Do you think they're not going to USE that police state? Of course they are. Those empty camps aren't going to be empty much longer.
Jeez. When Jon Stewart has obviously been cowed into submission, you know the end is near.
-FL
You know, given that reviews are supposed to be reviews of the MOVIE in question and not rants about amazon's business tactics (even if they're rants that are factually accurate), I don't think this is actually a bad thing.
Well. . , sheesh, you still review the film. Plenty of reviews there make reference to other reviews. In any case, what's worse? A bunch of fake reviews which deliberately try to mislead you, or a criticism of the fact that you're being misled?
-FL
Amazon is selling the IMDb as a marketing tool to Hollywood.
How?
Astro-turfing in the reviews section of the IMDb is not just allowed, (and I suspect, sold as a service to big film releases), but when you write a review pointing this out, that criticism vanishes. Or rather, it doesn't vanish, but only appears present to the IP address it came from while remaining invisible to the rest of the world.
Give it a try!
Next time a big block buster release comes out, head over to the IMDb in the first couple of days of release and after wading through the swamp of 10 star rave reviews, down to the bottom where the balanced reviews by real people are buried, and write your own pointing out that Amazon is selling favorable reviews to Hollywood marketing firms and that the movie in question probably sucks just badly enough to require the kind of manipulative push an astro-turfing tactic offers.
Then watch your review mysteriously vanish.
Go on! It's frustrating good times!
-FL
What I was saying, if you bothered to think about my post instead of immediately looking for what is wrong with it, is if you apply occam's razor, chances are it isn't aliens.
The problem is that Occam's razor is improperly understood and often used as a casual dismissal in lieu of more challenging thought exercises.
The basic misuse of Occam I see occurs when people measure what they believe may or may not be more likely based on incomplete knowledge and pre-existing biases. For example, when Alexander Graham Bell announced to the world that he could send voices down thin copper wire, there was outrage. I remember reading a large essay from a news archive, published in a big, respected paper of the day, complete with illustrations and accurate maths, stating that it was impossible for voices to carry down metal tubes of the diameter Bell was using in his experiments. -The sceptics of the day were thinking about the known models for voice transfer through tubes, commonly used on ships, and so in their eyes, had they applied Occam's Razor, they would pulled up a negative result because their knowledge structure at that time did not include electricity in the way Bell was using it.
This is the problem with Occam. Its users rely on self-referential data and known quantities to establish probability.
When one explores sufficiently the vast wells of data available regarding UFOs and similar, Occam's Razor cuts in the other direction.
-FL
That's an excellent point, so long as you maintain the ability to cross borders and get out of the trade-collapse zone. Travel is hard if you're hungry. Heck, basic rational thought is hard if you're hungry.
But it's true; we've not experienced in recent centuries a world-wide collapse scenario. So long as one or two industrialized countries manage to maintain stability, then that would allow other countries to open trade relations and slowly get back on their feet. -If, that is, everybody plays nice.
There's lots of gold and silver and other precious metals and resources in third world countries, but they remain hell-holes through one means or another, sometimes repression on the global stage, other times through sheer momentum of existing situations.
I suppose clever, well-informed and determined individuals will be able to maneuver themselves through hazards even as vast as a new ice age. The equatorial regions generally stay warm enough for agriculture during dark ages. But curiously, whole populations stuck it out in the mud in the past. Though this time, there is greater knowledge and infrastructure available to facilitate maneuvering. And much greater police and military forces in place to make damned certain this doesn't happen.
Those global elites are quite aware of the situation unfolding, and they will be wanting the nice sunny beaches to themselves, and perhaps a few million slaves to do the work, but no more.
-FL
Gold is only useful if you can hang on to it and survive the years between total collapse and the rebuilding of a new world.
Generally, gold is seized by whatever autocrats and strong-men are vying for power in the interim. In any case, during the hungry years, nobody has any use for gold.
But what's interesting this time around is that we're entering an age where canned goods are stable and good for years. We've never been through a societal collapse which has had access to high-quality, preserved goods.
Whatever. Skill sets are more important in the long run. Can you farm or make useful things? What value do you personally hold? Do people like you?
-FL
Your points are entirely fair.
Keep in mind that the three major religions (and a fair number of minor ones) all have the same origin. So these "coincidences" are of the form of easily explained cause and effect. Further, it's vanishingly small chance that we'd have this particular group dominating world religions (if we could somehow restart human civilization from scratch a bunch of times), but some set of religions would be there. That turns the observation into an insignificant one.
I wasn't presenting the current volatile setup of religions as proof of hyperdimensional tinkering. Rather I was suggesting that it is an end result of tinkering we have been told has taken place if certain working theories are accepted. Can it be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt? No. But then you can't prove that anything exists outside the room you are in while you are inside it. 'Proof' is a matter of reaching agreement using certain base assumptions, which we make and agree are reasonable despite our ability to actually prove them. No scientist can ever prove that s/he actually exists or that the world is not a dream, so a base assumption we work from is to simply accept this paradox and move on. It's the base assumptions which are in question, and those need to be built up from elemental blocks to provide the workings of a belief system.
One of the base elements I accept is that communication with aliens is on-going through channeling experiments. (And through which it has been described that history is regularly tampered with.) This base element assumption, (that of communication with aliens or that channeling works as advertised), must be examined and broken down into pieces which must be accepted or not accepted on the weight of smaller bits of observation which, if they don't break down logically, serve that end. Since most of that discussion falls outside the accepted parameters of common science, such assumptions remain off the table for most people and so the claim that "History is regularly tampered with" has nothing to back it up in terms of acceptable proof. An exploration of non-orthodox assumptions, and a personal sifting and logical analysis is required before one can proceed.
Interestingly, when one does take the time to explore this stuff, the weight of the many types of observation and supporting observation does build up quite quickly into a body of work which is hard to ignore, but many will never take the time to step outside the boundaries of official science, and so will never gain the observations required to move ahead.
One of the things we have been told is that this, (the nature of official knowledge), like the state of religion, is also arranged by design in order to prevent people from learning about their predicament.
As to the rest of your claims, you need evidence. What I mean by that is facts or observations that can distinguish between your tale and mundane explanations (like a heaping lot of wishful thinking). For example, 120 eye witnesses to UFOs in the nuclear weapons program?
Why 120? Is that a magic number where witness testimony is suddenly reliable? Of course not, and I'm not suggesting that you believe it to be so. But it does raise an interesting point. The more observers agree on an observation, the more ready we are to accept it.
As it happens, there are FAR more than 120 witnesses to UFO related events. Richard Dolan, (look him up), took the time to research and document events taken only from multiple witness accounts where the witnesses were pilots, police officers, military officers and various other people occupying positions of authority requiring them to document their observations and maintain a serious, rational state of mind. Often there are accompanying recordings in the form of radar records, film from gun cameras on aircraft and similar. The weight of this body of evidence is enough for some people to start taking the next steps toward agreeing upon acce
Yes, but do you have any products I can use to straighten my hair?
-FL
Yeah, actually we shot it on a Tuesday afternoon because the weekend would have been mayhem. A lot of the shops had no camera policies so Patrick filmed it all on his D-SLR hung at stomach level so that he just looked like a tourist rather than someone filming footage.
You know, I wondered about that. Everybody you ran into seemed so totally un-obsessed with camera fear that I thought, "Sheesh, maybe Japanese retail vendors are simply happier and less paranoid than everybody in the West?" The camera work was good enough for me to think that it wasn't being done on the sly. Nice job! -Oh, and of course, all your dialogue would have seemed normal to anybody witnessing because they would have simply thought it was being directed to your 'tourist' friend. What a clever set-up!
-Except for that robot shop; they seemed pretty happy to turn it into an impromptu sales pitch.
Ha ha!
-FL
A video catalog of the various shops in a tinkerer's paradise!
That was an awesome little tour. I think every city has a few electronic parts stores, but I've never seen anything so extensive or well-categorized. I seem to recall a lot more cardboard bins and chaos. The thing which surprised me the most was that it wasn't shoulder-to-shoulder madness. I've been in cities with a lot fewer people and you barely move around in shops like that, but in Japan (of all places), there was permanently enough room not just to navigate but to have a camera man follow you around also.
Maybe it was just early on a week day. Or perhaps that's just what happens when you spread everything out and have more of it.
What a fun video repository, though. Made me feel like a kid again!
-FL
A stalker hangs outside your house then pounces you with, "I've been watching you!" as if your front porch were simply on his route home.
Yeah, that's actually kind of paranoid. Maybe get some sunshine and fresh air?
You are a stalker and a hypocrite, a stereotypical sort who preaches selflessness while providing his name twice in his missives, a proto-troll who begins with a hyper-politically correct invective asserting that good grammar is a sign of compassion and rounds off his rhetorical Happy Meal by suggesting that the other house is a "retard".
Calling "Asperger's" is any different? And I'm the hypocrite? At least I was being fair.
But you know what? You win. I don't have the energy to spare. So please, believe whatever you will.
Thank you, my homeboy, and good day.
Righto. Bye.
-FL
I think we're on the same page, except that your reading of it is a bit more clear.
Good points.
-FL
Yes I am sure they have. All I was doing was making a point while in the middle of my class on the Sociology of Deviant Behavior so I apologize that it was not up to your high standards. But just a hint, when posting try not to sound like a pompous ass. Just for your information, I am a member of Mensa.
You were writing with dismissive arrogance on a subject you didn't know anything about and I was responding appropriately. Actually, I was being quite nice about it, given the social norms of this forum.
I would ask, "Why are people so easily offended when it is pointed out that they don't know something?" but I already know the answer. -And it's many times worse when you happen to be crammed among high IQs competing for the little scraps of love and respect handed down to the smartest kids in class.
-FL
but it puzzles me that the CIA/whoever could successfully cover UFO stories up for decades, while failing to prevent stuff like Abu Ghraib from coming out within a few months of it happening.
What's so puzzling?
There's tons of information out there, photographs, accounts, dead cows, crop circles. . . Has been for years.
The fact of the matter is that people have been trained to ignore that which the talking heads on TV have not sanctified with the wand of authoritative recognition and acceptance into "Official Reality".
It's true that you can't keep a secret. There are always leaks. However, you CAN keep the public from wanting to look or think about that secret. It's quite easy, actually. You just say, "X is uncool. Only losers think about X." We didn't go to school to learn math and science. We wen to school to learn our social programming.
It's the genius of mind-control.
Seriously; the particular group of people in this story have been around for quite a few years now, speaking the same message about UFOs. The only difference is that the news media looks like it consider validating them. That's the only thing which has changed.
That people's filters can be so immediately altered with such a subtle shift speaks volumes about how terribly programmed our society is.
It would be pathetic if it weren't also so very dangerous.
-FL
That's nice except that the "know what they are talking about" crowd probably has zero intersection with humanity.
I don't know if you meant this facetiously or not, but there is some truth to that. Compare the honors engineering graduate to the average Walmart shopper whose knowledge is soundly based on Fox News, and how much awkwardness there would be if you place one in a party of the other's choosing, (in either direction).
Same thing here, but more so, especially considering that increasing awareness in these directions includes learning how humans function. After a certain point, it becomes hard to not see other people as relatively simple machines, constantly going through the same automatic routines which they mistake for real thought and free will. (The solution is recognizing that everybody is on a learning curve which we must all go through, and being encouraging rather than impatient. But it's a helluva trick at times.)
My view is that there could be supernatural things, which could be sentient in some sense, but their interaction with our universe has to respect the rules of the universe, that is, maintain the "illusion". That includes such things as casualty, the ordering of time as we see it.
If your time line had been altered thousands of times so that your existence was trained to grow in a certain direction, like a vine or bonsai tree, how would you recognize that this was happening? The closest we get to an awareness of this is the experience of Deja Vu, which can in some instances indicate a significant point of choosing visited numerous times before and recognized on a soul level. Causality is only a problem with time travel in the "Back to the Future" sense, which is not the issue here since that's not how it works.
Since there is no time, and it's all just a matter of the world being manipulated along the axis we experience as 'time', then no action can break any rules of causality. (That's a mouthful. Sorry. Let me put it this way: To a two-dimensional creature, it would appear that we can perform magic, but we're not breaking any rules by manipulating objects in the 3rd dimension. The same holds true one step up the awareness ladder. Causality is automatically self-regulating).
Though coincidences can certainly seem to pile up. --It's awfully convenient, for instance, that the three major religions happen to be rigged the way they are.
-FL
Perhaps it is not genetics that is the problem, but the limits of the imposed illusion of time?
Our perception of time is the direct result of our genetic make-up.
The way I think of it is this...
1. You existed five minutes ago.
2. You exist now.
3. Your brain took in information from both those moments and all the intervening ones. It just happens to process that information in serial rather than parallel.
Genetics of a higher order capable of parallel processing of incoming information would offer a wildly different perception of reality. Time travel would not have anything to do with wormholes and such, but rather simply the focusing of attention on your body ten years ago the same way you might focus on your finger rather than your shoulder.
In any case, paranoia is only paranoia when it isn't based on anything. I'm not making this stuff up out of thin air.
-FL
Good point.
The fact of the matter is that this group of high-ranking witnesses has been around for several years now, pumping this same line. If you know where to find them, then sure, they've got a lot of fascinating notes to share. But the media has ignored them.
The interesting thing now is that this is receiving actual main-stream attention with the possibility of official acknowledgment. Now THAT'S spooky. It means somebody, somewhere is planning something. You don't turn on that big a switch in the public mind without wanting to get something out of it on the other side.
Consider; this same week, a new and high production-value TV program aired called, "The Event" just aired. It's also about aliens and conspiracies and government cover-ups. Reuters and Hollywood are simply output pipes on the same media machine and the timing for this kind of social engineering is impeccable given that the planet is about to start freezing and starving. I'm noticing other similar trends in the societal mind share on this topic.
Something is definitely up. Whether it is going to be a bait & switch kind of maneuver designed to lock down thinking patters, (like the fake moon landing con), or if it is simply time to wake people up to new masters or whatever. . , who the heck knows?
But it'll be neat to see how it all plays out.
-FL
Seriously? This is ridiculous. While I'm sure aliens exist somewhere light years away. 2 things come to mind. 1 Why the hell do we feel so important that other species would want to come and bother us and 2 its probably some terrestrial experiment, probably designed to destroy nukes.
Your assumptions are hopelessly under-informed. Smarter people than you have asked those obvious questions and have spent years hunting through the paper work to determine their answers.
You could do very well for yourself by looking at the results of their research so that you don't have to do the big hunt on your own.
Don't feel too bad; 90% of the eye-rollingly silly remarks made here are just as ill-informed. It seems to be a common fall-back position when new information is made available which upsets the orthodoxy. People grasp.
-FL
You tell him!
-SockpuppetGuy
As it stands, if these reports reflect a true phenomena, let's say, Greys conducting covert reconnaissance of the Earth for some reason, then why screw around with the most militarily sensitive spots on the planet? What do they gain from that activity over decades which balances the risk of getting caught? The thing is that there's a certain sloppiness to the UFOs in these stories. They're visible, they do stuff that's likely to get powerful organizations riled up, and there's the risk of technology falling into relatively capable hands.
Think of it this way; it's not the U.S. overflying a bunch of cavemen. It's the U.S. overflying a bunch of mice. The prevailing thought among people who know what they are talking about, is that this is not a nuts & bolts activity and that aliens are not confined to traveling through time the way we do; they exist in a different state where the illusion of time simply isn't there. There's about as much danger from us unraveling their technology as there is of cows learning how to work the tractor. We don't have the genetic capability or awareness.
Screwing with a missile silo might be on par with curiously poking an ant war with a stick. Our own government would cover it up simply because it is unacceptable for us to feel unsafe or that there is an enemy out there which simply cannot be fought, negotiated or bargained with.
One of the basic items which comes up when you dig deep enough is that we are food; anxiety, pain and high emotion provide a type of energy which can be consumed and that the human race has been bred up into the billions, history has been sculpted for the end purpose of drawing off this energy in one vast harvest.
It's hard to grasp, but while we require physical food, we can also certainly consume this same energetic stuff in a limited way; think of popularity cliques in schools. People feel good when they bully others; it's an energetic transfer and this on higher levels of reality apparently offers substantial benefit. There's a reason we've been gradually tuning ourselves racially to not just accept things like torture and warfare, but to crave it.
-FL
Oh, you're just one of those creepy stalkers who encounters someone on the Internet with more than one opinion he doesn't like and splatters with the crudest strokes an e-psychological diagnosis to summarily dismiss opposing ideas.
Stalker? Ha ha! Don't flatter yourself. I simply pay attention to all the many thousands of things I read and tend to have a good memory. Trust me. You are not important. I know, it's probably asking the impossible for you to recognize that. Comparing yourself to Turing. . ? Oh dear! (And for the record, I have no problem with gays. I DO have problems with sociopaths and assholes, though.)
But if you want to clean up your act, you might try saying fewer thoughtless things and take the time to ensure your grammar doesn't make you sound like a retard.
Just a thought.
-FL
Worked up? No. Just observing you, pointing out patterns and asking questions.
You might ask yourself why you find that so upsetting.
And it wasn't a mis-placed apostrophe. It was garbled weirdness of a high order and the particular brand of justification you used, among several other things and general observation over time. Basically, the bubble version of your reality is vastly different from the real one which everybody else can see.
Mirror, mirror. . .
You're not even picking your own words, reflecting back at me the same phraseology and style of communication I was using, (though the bitterness is your own special addition). This is also typical of the sociopathic individual. They have no personality of their own, and so they reflect those around them out of basic instinct, typically because the unknowing observer is then able to see his or herself in the sociopath, making detection less likely.
Again, just observing some known facts about sociopaths. I'm not judging you. As I said before, you might just be a regular asshat.
-FL
Dragon NaturallySpeaking is sufficiently accurate that I don't even bother to check what it has transcribed any more, allowing me to rant at leisure while reading something else.
When it makes a mistake, I always have Asperger's sufferers to point it out for the benefit of everyone else.
I can't tell if this is standard narcissistic behavior or just basic ass-hattery. --This being an example of a person who lives so soundly inside a personal bubble reality that it doesn't even think it is necessary to go to the trouble of communicating correctly in order to believe that its thoughts are understood by the rest of the world; after all, why put in the effort since the universe and all of its contents are already a simple extension of its own ego? Babies exist for a period where there is no division between the "I" and the rest of the universe. In sociopaths, conditions exist which prevent the natural growth period of the brain into a state of natural separation where it is recognized that there is more than just the self.
This separation is required if compassion is to emerge. Those without compassion would not bother trying to communicate clearly. Who cares, after all about anybody else? The only reason to communicate clearly is in order to manipulate those peculiar "others" out there as though they were toys.
But of course, when the universe looks on at this broken behavior and points out that the ego in question is seriously mistaken in its assumptions, the reaction is abusive.
-FL