The encryption system is only there to show due diligence in attempting to protect themselves and thus give the authorities a tidy rationalization for putting people in cages for no good reason. Though I doubt the intention of turning people into criminals, (criminalizing humanity?), is an Intel or even a DMCA objective. They're both just tools, I'd say, reacting to the installed mind control systems, ie, the belief that information and knowledge itself are property.
If as consumers we only wanted the best of the best and price wasn't an object then everyone would be driving luxury cars and have giant mansions.
The problem is that in this particular case the class division is entirely artificial; price ISN'T an object. What's wrong with everybody having luxury cars and giant mansions if it doesn't stress the system, which in this case, it doesn't?
I reject the notion that most people should live econo-class simply to make rich people feel superior. If extended to health care and food and water resources, this becomes an intolerable situation when the misery is deliberately manufactured for the express purpose of creating a visible wealth divide.
Jeezuz. I think you need to pull your eyes back a few more inches to look at the big picture.
This is the same issue as Net Neutrality. Creating artificial shortages in order to stratify the public into haves and have-nots when everybody could happily have the same highest level of quality for the same reasonable price.
If this system comes into effect in its fullest expression, do you honestly believe that you would even be able to afford a "first class" processor? If when buying hardware, you even entertain the IDEA that you might like to upgrade later, (as you indicate), then you don't have enough money to ever be a first class computer user.
The only reason I'd be for this idea is that artificial limitations can be hacked, and usually are. But then it would be just one more intensely stupid way that people would be criminalized.
How does one contort their brains to the extent where that seems the reasonable outcome?
Just use the logic you offered but in reverse, then instead of calling it "contorted" call it "sane".
You sound like a character from a Douglas Adams novel.
Artificially gimping an otherwise perfectly good product in order to create a market is screwed up. Rationally, you charge extra for the extra effort required to provide higher quality and higher performance. That makes sense and it is morally acceptable. In this case, since it takes no extra effort to provide the highest quality, any price differential is now based on falsehoods and psychological manipulations rather than honest pay for honest work.
Just because this is common practice does not make it sane. It makes it disrespectful. It's disrespectful to manipulate people as though they were lab rats.
The fact that you're okay with that, means you've either forgotten or don't have the capacity to understand what it means to be truly human. There are a lot of human-like entities freely walking around in the world, but it doesn't mean they should be.
That's just fear expressing itself. A little clear-eyed rational thinking might lead to scary realizations, but fear can be mastered, and then it goes away. Living a lie, by contrast, is just plain suicide. You can hum and whistle all you want, but the house will still be on fire. (Or vanishing under a mile of ice, as it were.)
That's a high cost for walking around avoiding uncomfortable subjects.
Well, then, do a Google Image Search on Kiribati. And Tuvalu. You'll find pictures of beaches lined with dead palm trees. Those trees are dead because sea level rise raised the average salinity of the ground water they're rooted in. This is what they are "whining" about: our energy consumption is raising sea levels and making their islands uninhabitable.
I used to be on that bandwagon for a long time; the story made sense on the surface and independent research on the subject was very difficult to do. Measuring the behavior of the biosphere is not like researching most other subjects. Human history or astronomy or technology, where the observations and recordings are the sort of thing which are either set in amber or easily verified through observation, are far easier to research because the facts don't change in your hands. Biosphere measurements are hard to take because the whole thing is in a state of permanent flux, because we haven't been around taking measurements for long enough to know it very well, and because we are right in the middle of the thing we are trying to measure. It's hard to see.
But as the dust began to settle, it has become increasingly clear that there is a large scam in the works and that it is dependent upon the normal population being guilted into accepting totalitarian control. The end results being that the elite make even more money without there being any actual industrial carbon reductions. (Quite the trick!) People don't seem to realize that a "Carbon Tax" isn't some vague notion which affects only big companies and governments. Oh no! Carbon taxes are for you and me on the street level. We would have to pay an extra tax on virtually everything we do in our lives which can be traced back to energy consumption. A tax bonanza! Take a look into it to see what is being proposed.
This kind of story, (and note that Rockefeller is involved in this island thing. The Rockefellers are champions of population control and oligarchic power structures, so yeah, his showing up is an indicator of badness.)
And of course it's all based on bullshit. As has been already noted, this island situation doesn't just include shrinking islands but rather, growing ones as well...
One island, Funamanu, gained 0.44 hectares or nearly 30 percent of its previous area.
And the research showed similar trends in the Republic of Kiribati, where the three main urbanised islands also "grew" - Betio by 30 percent (36ha), Bairiki by 16.3 percent (5.8ha) and Nanikai by 12.5 percent (0.8ha).
Webb, an expert on coastal processes, told the New Scientist the trend was explained by the fact the islands mostly comprised coral debris eroded from encircling reefs and pushed up onto the islands by winds and waves.
The process was continuous, because the corals were alive, he said.
In effect the islands respond to changes in weather patterns and climate - Cyclone Bebe deposited 140ha of sediment on the eastern reef of Tuvalu in 1972, increasing the main island's area by 10 percent.
And while this article is critical of the base story, it still takes for granted that sea-levels are rising. I'm not convinced that this is A) even True, or B) if it IS true that it is due to ice pack melting; we've actually been seeing expansion of the ice packs in some areas. It has also been noted (quietly) that the planet has been spinning a little slower over the last few years, and that this is having a strong effect on the biosphere and the shapes of land masses and oceans.
There is no question that the weather hasn't been changing, but it has also been changing on the other planets in the solar system. And the Sun has been behaving oddly as well. There are theories as to what is going on, and they are more complex than the highly profitable Global Warming story. Just like real life, things are more complex than the simple black & white government brochure would lead us to believe.
Please tell us your version of the G20 summit. All I heard was that a bunch of protesters were sitting our doing there thing when a tiny percentage of them went anarchist and started burning and smashing everything in sight. Then the police stepped in with an iron boot and arrested a few hundred. No?
No. And it was well over a thousand citizens, most totally innocent, some even just on their way home from work or wherever, rounded up and held in unheated cages for two days and longer while the cops either laughed at them or felt so much shame they couldn't make eye-contact.
Also, look up the term, "Agent Provocateur". THAT was the big story which the media refuses to look at. It's huge. It was a big, big part of the events which unfolded. Canada has a history with that kind of manipulation going back to previous fiascos. In one instance in Quebec, cops pretending to be anarchists dressed in the same basic get-up as the G20 'anarchists', were captured on film and proven to be police agents. The police, after several attempted lies, were forced to admit it, (though no real measures were taken or penalties paid in the end by the police. Business as usual). After all their lies up to that point, it was hard to believe their protestations that their agents were not there to incite violence, but simply to monitor and keep people safe. -They told us this even when one of their thugs was holding a nice weaponized rock on camera and refused to put it down when asked by a legitimate protester. Such bullshit. The government cannot ever be trusted.
Anyway, in this latest instance, the threads on the official account when pulled come apart very quickly for anybody with the stomach and spine for it. (Most aren't. The number of people who bury their heads in the sand is sadly quite large in Canada.) The cops even ponied up some sacrificial squad cars for a nice photo-op public burning in order to justify the 1.4 billion dollars poured into summit security. But the media refused to explore that angle, which of course is to be expected by a media bought and paid for. The only real story here was that of a giant manipulation in order to bring Canada up to speed with modern population control tactics, and by "brought up to speed", I mean two things; installing hardware and procedures for corralling humans into cages in large numbers, and installing the mind-programming to make sure the population knows that this is the new "normal".
They're one of the most successful players on the world stage. Diplomatic, friendly, sociable and selfish. How can you lose?
Canada is going dark. If you want to be a part of the program, you'll be okay. If you want to be an individual, you'd better only do that within the acceptable boundaries, which are, for the most part, pretty wide. But the problem is that they're narrowing. There is a lot of pressure being put on the country these days from dark forces; the people have been sufficiently dumbed down to have allowed a genuine psychopath into power.
You need to come up with more than ten million per year just to stay on top of the interest payments. (Keeping in mind that interest is added to the total debt and racks up its own interest.)
Also keep in mind that the 3.64 million per month is gross. Not net.
Sounds like a sinking ship to me. To turn it around would cost millions more in advertising, and frankly, that's not a for-sure thing.
But hey, it's probably a big, happy tax write-off for somebody and all the programmers and creative people got paid, so it's just a bunch of bankers or venture capitalists who got burned. Anybody with that kind of cash isn't going to be homeless tomorrow, so no need for tears.
I'm betting that the whole thing was a propaganda op by our very own CIA, and now that it's unraveling, they're pinning it on a scapegoat.
Close, but actually, this is one of those win/wins.
Remember the primary objective: "Demonize Iran to hoodwink the public into releasing the funds for another catastrophic religious/resource war."
This story pays out twice. Once when it announced defeat over the "Bad Guys", and then again when it turns out that the Bad Guys were not defeated after all. End result? More pent-up frustration which the Western Populace has been trained is most easily released through gun fire.
A propaganda wet-dream, and I agree, almost certainly deliberate, given that the media is bought and paid for. They even have Jon Stewart in line these days.
Interesting, but I'd say France is doing well in spite of Sarkozy, who appears to be doing everything in his power to destroy France. Same thing is happening in Canada under the current prime minister.
The conspiracy part of me thinks, "This is a marketing tactic run on one of two levels; 1. to affect how people perceive Apple software security and quit complaining so much (less likely), or 2. To affect how people perceive the loss of freedom and get them to quit complaining so much because even the super-wealthy have to put up with it, (more likely)"
Except honestly, this time, the scales just don't tip. I actually think this time it's just some plain ol' human fumbling around with Jobs being a doofus.
But the spiritual pattern watcher part of me. . , that part notes that he's scaled his second great mountain and that it should be nearing time for his second great fall. I wonder if it'll stand on its own or simply coincide with the rest of the planetary meltdown. . ?
How did it happen last time? Fired by his own company, some kind of organ failure and a bit of grasping about in the ghetto of Next or whatever it was? I can't recall exactly. As much as I think Jobs is a manipulative knob, I do cringe on his behalf considering the spectacular heights he has to tumble from.
After the rest of the world has caught up with ARM based tablet thingies for $50 and under with cooler everything and open-architecture software, Apple's income will seize and with no grand new ideas forthcoming, in desperation and high anxiety, Jobs will somehow be ejected or asked to leave or simply pull Apple down with him into mediocrity. There has to be a component of a once-loving community of power-brokers turning its back on him in a cut-throat manner, but that can take many forms.
All assuming, of course, there's still a human race in two years time to care.
It is entirely possible for people to cynically copy and use high production standards to create something flashy. But it is impossible to replicate that exciting quantity which only comes when a creator is truly jazzed about the work. Of course, creators working with old ideas, if there is genuine creative excitement involved, will inflate those copied ideas so that they become their own fresh entities. But that doesn't happen very often, which is why so often polished media is boring and lackluster.
Being able to tell the difference is variously called, "Having Taste", or "Snobbery". I also like to call it, "Not wanting to be seen as merely a consumer to be manipulated into buying something."
I want to share in the experience of genuine creative acts! When that energy isn't present, all you have is a bit of polished, flashy media with no soul. Yawn.
Harper, in his attempts to create a "Fox News" in Canada blasts those opposed to it using "Free Speech" arguments.
Harper is a hypocritical creep who has NO interest in the good of the people. He is interested in dumbing them down, propagandizing at them and limiting knowledge.
Propaganda is not an attempt to communicate. Rather, it regards people not as people but as little machines which can be programmed using the right strings of words and images calculated to illicit desired behavior. The moment somebody intends to manipulate, the act of communication has ended and the act of programming has begun. Freedom of speech laws were designed with the idea in mind that people fundamentally respected the humanness of their peers. They didn't have to respect one another's opinions, but the underlying assumption is that we are appealing to the soul and intelligence on a personal level and not a cynical machine-programming level. Put another way, humans must treat each other as humans and not as lab rats.
Propaganda doesn't respect fundamental humanity and therefore should not be brought under the protection of freedom of speech. Same with advertising.
Let me try to break it down for anybody confused by that video. . .
Yes, on the most fundamental level, we live in self-service society. Every time we feed ourselves, we must take life, be it plant or animal. There is simply no getting around the nature of our reality in this regard.
Greed, however, as I define the term, is not the same as what one might call, functional self-interest. Those afflicted with Greed like to rationalize their disease by claiming it is natural and good. But it is not. It's like saying eating all the food at the table and leaving none for the rest of your family is good because we need to eat to survive. Greed destroys communities, whole societies. Witness the economic melt-down of our current society. Self-interest allowed to go cancerous without any of the rational self-limiting behavior a responsible adult ought to show has resulted in wars, catastrophic oil spills, economic collapse. -And, I would point out, an un-trustworthy medical establishment.
The problem is that psychopaths are basically humans which never grew emotional capacities beyond those of a toddler. They cannot differentiate between themselves and the rest of the world. They WANT and they NEED, self-interest on over-drive, and all they did upon maturing is learn how to manipulate the world into delivering a constant, endless and beyond-reason stream of resources down their gullet.
In that way, Greed destroys and is, in fact, a disease, not to be mistaken for common self-interest.
And finally. . , the comparative comments made by that Friedman guy regarding Soviet Russia must be recognized as irrelevant. There's a big difference between mandating control measures to weed out psychopaths and corrupt behavior known to cause systematic failure (like the housing market melt-down), and a social experiment which tried to control all aspects of a population's self expression via centralized government. Those two animals are not the same, but it's easy to fool people with the comparison.
Friedman asks, "Where are you going to find the angels?"
Those ascending to positions of power need to be tested for sociopathy. That would be a BIG step.
I have no idea what your comment means, but it's modded insightful so I have to respond.
You don't understand but you cannot resist filling the air with your redundant opinions anyway? Jeezuz. There are several names for people like you.
The reality is that the diseases that vaccinations prevent are far more horrible than you can imagine, probably because you've grown up in a world without them. Parents who do not vaccinate their children are irresponsible. They are blind to what these diseases do because when they grew up the diseases barely existed in countries with vaccination (if at all). By not vaccinating your children you not only risk their lives but you risk the lives of countless others. The reasoning behind the choices of not to vaccinate are largely based on pseudoscience and absurd.
Uh huh. Thank-you for repeating the standard argument which has been uttered a million times before. Do you imagine that I've never heard it or that a simple re-application is going to convince anybody who has taken the time to look beyond its simplicity? Is that really how your world works? Repeating something until it blots out any awkward and uncomfortable realities?
Now, please read SLOWLY and try to understand the following. . .
Vaccines are a GOOD idea. Full stop.
The people today who produce, promote, sell and administer them are NOT trust-worthy. They are by degrees non-critical true-believers who render themselves incapable of preventing or solving the problems created by those who are deceptive or even merely incompetent.
Those two concepts are not the same, and repeating the first loudly doesn't make the other go away, nor will it. And it was this constant repeating that I was pointing out with my initial statement, (the statement you failed to understand). The irony here is as thick as peanut butter.
No. The history and empirical evidence is that vaccines work very well, with very few side effects.
As I said, vaccines are a great idea. But did you not pay attention during the debacle of the last flu season? Billions of dollars changed hands and the vaccine caused much of the reported damage.
Sure, Polio is a great thing to wave goodbye to. But many decades have passed, the people have changed and the product and the marketing and the intentions behind them are no longer singular.
History and empirical evidence doesn't just point to the things you want them to point to. That's a variation of confirmation bias. You have to observe the big picture, because like it or not, greed is in effect and population-wide jabs, which so many people literally become enraged at the slightest suggestion that they should be re-considered, are an excellent way to subdue and control a population.
But a rational examination and sifting through all the mountains of history and empirical evidence tells us that we simply cannot trust the people who make, promote, sell and administer these drugs.
I'd love to live in a Star Trek reality, where you can trust government and where everybody is truly striving through the application of honest science toward the very best we can be as a species. But there is no greed in Star Trek, and no psychopaths in power and no survival of the sneakiest doctrine in effect at all times.
Our world is not a sane and sensible Star Trek world, and to pretend otherwise, as much as our geek hearts may desire it, is suicidally naive.
Citations please? Someone has been watching too much Fidel Castro or something.
Really? You're not going to spend like thirty seconds on Google and consider your lack of familiarity with common knowledge to be a valid debating point? Your choice.
You know, the same general terms you threw around like "life in Iraq wasn't anywhere nearly as bad as the Western press dictated". I was specifically talking about South Western media, but whatever. Really, I was using your generalization, and I was there in 07.
So you were seeing a post-Saddam Iraq, with its infrastructure bombed to oblivion and its social networks torn apart by war. I imagine there are relatively few places on the planet which wouldn't seem better by comparison. By contrast, the Iraqi I was talking described a country BEFORE the 2003 invasion, and before the trade sanctions went into effect back in 1990. A very different country than the one you experienced.
Or other great crap you wrote like "a "brutal dictator" to us is a "king" to others. And the West, given its lack of wisdom and total inability to govern itself with any degree of humanity, has no business marching about trumpeting who should and should not be allowed to exist in the modern world."
Really, I don't remember the last time we executed a woman for having sex, or whipped her for being in public without covering her face. Can you name some Western atrocities? Sure. No place is perfect. But the utter lack of common sense from people like you is appalling.
I think you're confusing common sense with Pavlovian responses. Even during times of economic prosperity in the U.S. MILLIONS of people starve, go without medical care, education, because that's how our capitalist value system works. It's a human atrocity. Would you like to be invaded because another country might want to "reach out" (i.e., Bomb the living shit out of the very people they profess to be 'rescuing').
Basically, you got played. The government and the media played on your sympathies, and you got conned. Iraq wasn't saved. It's been reduced to a smoking shit hole and a small group of people made a LOT of money as a direct result. And why? Because people with good hearts weren't smart enough to see that an evil government was manipulating them.
Sorry for the bad news. Are man enough to look it in the face or are you going to continue lying to yourself?
Now that Wikileaks has been firmly established as the rebel hero of truth and justice, (Go Big Media Owned By. . . who?), and any information bubbling up from saint Julian's hard drive gets to skip past all vetting processes. . .
Would it be any surprise if new "Leaked" documents happened to contain somewhere within them evidence that Iran is deserving of a good bombing?
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Are you serious? You're going to defend BP?
Fuck you.
Oil can enter the food chain without you having to eat it directly. I dare you to have a fish dinner in Florida made from the local catch.
Get your head on straight. Defending corporate psychopaths is not cool, smart or even logically viable.
-FL
Agreed.
The encryption system is only there to show due diligence in attempting to protect themselves and thus give the authorities a tidy rationalization for putting people in cages for no good reason. Though I doubt the intention of turning people into criminals, (criminalizing humanity?), is an Intel or even a DMCA objective. They're both just tools, I'd say, reacting to the installed mind control systems, ie, the belief that information and knowledge itself are property.
-FL
If as consumers we only wanted the best of the best and price wasn't an object then everyone would be driving luxury cars and have giant mansions.
The problem is that in this particular case the class division is entirely artificial; price ISN'T an object. What's wrong with everybody having luxury cars and giant mansions if it doesn't stress the system, which in this case, it doesn't?
I reject the notion that most people should live econo-class simply to make rich people feel superior. If extended to health care and food and water resources, this becomes an intolerable situation when the misery is deliberately manufactured for the express purpose of creating a visible wealth divide.
-FL
Jeezuz. I think you need to pull your eyes back a few more inches to look at the big picture.
This is the same issue as Net Neutrality. Creating artificial shortages in order to stratify the public into haves and have-nots when everybody could happily have the same highest level of quality for the same reasonable price.
If this system comes into effect in its fullest expression, do you honestly believe that you would even be able to afford a "first class" processor? If when buying hardware, you even entertain the IDEA that you might like to upgrade later, (as you indicate), then you don't have enough money to ever be a first class computer user.
The only reason I'd be for this idea is that artificial limitations can be hacked, and usually are. But then it would be just one more intensely stupid way that people would be criminalized.
Fuck Intel on this. It's a bad call.
-FL
How does one contort their brains to the extent where that seems the reasonable outcome?
Just use the logic you offered but in reverse, then instead of calling it "contorted" call it "sane".
You sound like a character from a Douglas Adams novel.
Artificially gimping an otherwise perfectly good product in order to create a market is screwed up. Rationally, you charge extra for the extra effort required to provide higher quality and higher performance. That makes sense and it is morally acceptable. In this case, since it takes no extra effort to provide the highest quality, any price differential is now based on falsehoods and psychological manipulations rather than honest pay for honest work.
Just because this is common practice does not make it sane. It makes it disrespectful. It's disrespectful to manipulate people as though they were lab rats.
The fact that you're okay with that, means you've either forgotten or don't have the capacity to understand what it means to be truly human. There are a lot of human-like entities freely walking around in the world, but it doesn't mean they should be.
-FL
Really? "Flamebait"?
That's just fear expressing itself. A little clear-eyed rational thinking might lead to scary realizations, but fear can be mastered, and then it goes away. Living a lie, by contrast, is just plain suicide. You can hum and whistle all you want, but the house will still be on fire. (Or vanishing under a mile of ice, as it were.)
That's a high cost for walking around avoiding uncomfortable subjects.
Time to grow up.
-FL
Well, then, do a Google Image Search on Kiribati. And Tuvalu. You'll find pictures of beaches lined with dead palm trees. Those trees are dead because sea level rise raised the average salinity of the ground water they're rooted in. This is what they are "whining" about: our energy consumption is raising sea levels and making their islands uninhabitable.
I used to be on that bandwagon for a long time; the story made sense on the surface and independent research on the subject was very difficult to do. Measuring the behavior of the biosphere is not like researching most other subjects. Human history or astronomy or technology, where the observations and recordings are the sort of thing which are either set in amber or easily verified through observation, are far easier to research because the facts don't change in your hands. Biosphere measurements are hard to take because the whole thing is in a state of permanent flux, because we haven't been around taking measurements for long enough to know it very well, and because we are right in the middle of the thing we are trying to measure. It's hard to see.
But as the dust began to settle, it has become increasingly clear that there is a large scam in the works and that it is dependent upon the normal population being guilted into accepting totalitarian control. The end results being that the elite make even more money without there being any actual industrial carbon reductions. (Quite the trick!) People don't seem to realize that a "Carbon Tax" isn't some vague notion which affects only big companies and governments. Oh no! Carbon taxes are for you and me on the street level. We would have to pay an extra tax on virtually everything we do in our lives which can be traced back to energy consumption. A tax bonanza! Take a look into it to see what is being proposed.
This kind of story, (and note that Rockefeller is involved in this island thing. The Rockefellers are champions of population control and oligarchic power structures, so yeah, his showing up is an indicator of badness.)
And of course it's all based on bullshit. As has been already noted, this island situation doesn't just include shrinking islands but rather, growing ones as well...
One island, Funamanu, gained 0.44 hectares or nearly 30 percent of its previous area.
And the research showed similar trends in the Republic of Kiribati, where the three main urbanised islands also "grew" - Betio by 30 percent (36ha), Bairiki by 16.3 percent (5.8ha) and Nanikai by 12.5 percent (0.8ha).
Webb, an expert on coastal processes, told the New Scientist the trend was explained by the fact the islands mostly comprised coral debris eroded from encircling reefs and pushed up onto the islands by winds and waves.
The process was continuous, because the corals were alive, he said.
In effect the islands respond to changes in weather patterns and climate - Cyclone Bebe deposited 140ha of sediment on the eastern reef of Tuvalu in 1972, increasing the main island's area by 10 percent.
And while this article is critical of the base story, it still takes for granted that sea-levels are rising. I'm not convinced that this is A) even True, or B) if it IS true that it is due to ice pack melting; we've actually been seeing expansion of the ice packs in some areas. It has also been noted (quietly) that the planet has been spinning a little slower over the last few years, and that this is having a strong effect on the biosphere and the shapes of land masses and oceans.
There is no question that the weather hasn't been changing, but it has also been changing on the other planets in the solar system. And the Sun has been behaving oddly as well. There are theories as to what is going on, and they are more complex than the highly profitable Global Warming story. Just like real life, things are more complex than the simple black & white government brochure would lead us to believe.
Just some thoughts.
-FL
Please tell us your version of the G20 summit. All I heard was that a bunch of protesters were sitting our doing there thing when a tiny percentage of them went anarchist and started burning and smashing everything in sight. Then the police stepped in with an iron boot and arrested a few hundred. No?
No. And it was well over a thousand citizens, most totally innocent, some even just on their way home from work or wherever, rounded up and held in unheated cages for two days and longer while the cops either laughed at them or felt so much shame they couldn't make eye-contact.
Also, look up the term, "Agent Provocateur". THAT was the big story which the media refuses to look at. It's huge. It was a big, big part of the events which unfolded. Canada has a history with that kind of manipulation going back to previous fiascos. In one instance in Quebec, cops pretending to be anarchists dressed in the same basic get-up as the G20 'anarchists', were captured on film and proven to be police agents. The police, after several attempted lies, were forced to admit it, (though no real measures were taken or penalties paid in the end by the police. Business as usual). After all their lies up to that point, it was hard to believe their protestations that their agents were not there to incite violence, but simply to monitor and keep people safe. -They told us this even when one of their thugs was holding a nice weaponized rock on camera and refused to put it down when asked by a legitimate protester. Such bullshit. The government cannot ever be trusted.
Anyway, in this latest instance, the threads on the official account when pulled come apart very quickly for anybody with the stomach and spine for it. (Most aren't. The number of people who bury their heads in the sand is sadly quite large in Canada.) The cops even ponied up some sacrificial squad cars for a nice photo-op public burning in order to justify the 1.4 billion dollars poured into summit security. But the media refused to explore that angle, which of course is to be expected by a media bought and paid for. The only real story here was that of a giant manipulation in order to bring Canada up to speed with modern population control tactics, and by "brought up to speed", I mean two things; installing hardware and procedures for corralling humans into cages in large numbers, and installing the mind-programming to make sure the population knows that this is the new "normal".
-FL
They're one of the most successful players on the world stage. Diplomatic, friendly, sociable and selfish. How can you lose?
Canada is going dark. If you want to be a part of the program, you'll be okay. If you want to be an individual, you'd better only do that within the acceptable boundaries, which are, for the most part, pretty wide. But the problem is that they're narrowing. There is a lot of pressure being put on the country these days from dark forces; the people have been sufficiently dumbed down to have allowed a genuine psychopath into power.
Two words:
"Fox North."
-FL
Shit. You're right. I need to get my credit cards re-evaluated.
-FL
Let's say that 100 million was borrowed at 10%.
You need to come up with more than ten million per year just to stay on top of the interest payments. (Keeping in mind that interest is added to the total debt and racks up its own interest.)
Also keep in mind that the 3.64 million per month is gross. Not net.
Sounds like a sinking ship to me. To turn it around would cost millions more in advertising, and frankly, that's not a for-sure thing.
But hey, it's probably a big, happy tax write-off for somebody and all the programmers and creative people got paid, so it's just a bunch of bankers or venture capitalists who got burned. Anybody with that kind of cash isn't going to be homeless tomorrow, so no need for tears.
-FL
I'm betting that the whole thing was a propaganda op by our very own CIA, and now that it's unraveling, they're pinning it on a scapegoat.
Close, but actually, this is one of those win/wins.
Remember the primary objective: "Demonize Iran to hoodwink the public into releasing the funds for another catastrophic religious/resource war."
This story pays out twice. Once when it announced defeat over the "Bad Guys", and then again when it turns out that the Bad Guys were not defeated after all. End result? More pent-up frustration which the Western Populace has been trained is most easily released through gun fire.
A propaganda wet-dream, and I agree, almost certainly deliberate, given that the media is bought and paid for. They even have Jon Stewart in line these days.
-FL
Interesting, but I'd say France is doing well in spite of Sarkozy, who appears to be doing everything in his power to destroy France. Same thing is happening in Canada under the current prime minister.
-FL
The conspiracy part of me thinks, "This is a marketing tactic run on one of two levels; 1. to affect how people perceive Apple software security and quit complaining so much (less likely), or 2. To affect how people perceive the loss of freedom and get them to quit complaining so much because even the super-wealthy have to put up with it, (more likely)"
Except honestly, this time, the scales just don't tip. I actually think this time it's just some plain ol' human fumbling around with Jobs being a doofus.
But the spiritual pattern watcher part of me. . , that part notes that he's scaled his second great mountain and that it should be nearing time for his second great fall. I wonder if it'll stand on its own or simply coincide with the rest of the planetary meltdown. . ?
How did it happen last time? Fired by his own company, some kind of organ failure and a bit of grasping about in the ghetto of Next or whatever it was? I can't recall exactly. As much as I think Jobs is a manipulative knob, I do cringe on his behalf considering the spectacular heights he has to tumble from.
After the rest of the world has caught up with ARM based tablet thingies for $50 and under with cooler everything and open-architecture software, Apple's income will seize and with no grand new ideas forthcoming, in desperation and high anxiety, Jobs will somehow be ejected or asked to leave or simply pull Apple down with him into mediocrity. There has to be a component of a once-loving community of power-brokers turning its back on him in a cut-throat manner, but that can take many forms.
All assuming, of course, there's still a human race in two years time to care.
Interesting times.
-FL
It is entirely possible for people to cynically copy and use high production standards to create something flashy. But it is impossible to replicate that exciting quantity which only comes when a creator is truly jazzed about the work. Of course, creators working with old ideas, if there is genuine creative excitement involved, will inflate those copied ideas so that they become their own fresh entities. But that doesn't happen very often, which is why so often polished media is boring and lackluster.
Being able to tell the difference is variously called, "Having Taste", or "Snobbery". I also like to call it, "Not wanting to be seen as merely a consumer to be manipulated into buying something."
I want to share in the experience of genuine creative acts! When that energy isn't present, all you have is a bit of polished, flashy media with no soul. Yawn.
Souls recognize souls.
-FL
Harper, in his attempts to create a "Fox News" in Canada blasts those opposed to it using "Free Speech" arguments.
Harper is a hypocritical creep who has NO interest in the good of the people. He is interested in dumbing them down, propagandizing at them and limiting knowledge.
Propaganda is not an attempt to communicate. Rather, it regards people not as people but as little machines which can be programmed using the right strings of words and images calculated to illicit desired behavior. The moment somebody intends to manipulate, the act of communication has ended and the act of programming has begun. Freedom of speech laws were designed with the idea in mind that people fundamentally respected the humanness of their peers. They didn't have to respect one another's opinions, but the underlying assumption is that we are appealing to the soul and intelligence on a personal level and not a cynical machine-programming level. Put another way, humans must treat each other as humans and not as lab rats.
Propaganda doesn't respect fundamental humanity and therefore should not be brought under the protection of freedom of speech. Same with advertising.
-FL
Ha ha!
Oh dear. Life IS confusing, isn't it?
Let me try to break it down for anybody confused by that video. . .
Yes, on the most fundamental level, we live in self-service society. Every time we feed ourselves, we must take life, be it plant or animal. There is simply no getting around the nature of our reality in this regard.
Greed, however, as I define the term, is not the same as what one might call, functional self-interest. Those afflicted with Greed like to rationalize their disease by claiming it is natural and good. But it is not. It's like saying eating all the food at the table and leaving none for the rest of your family is good because we need to eat to survive. Greed destroys communities, whole societies. Witness the economic melt-down of our current society. Self-interest allowed to go cancerous without any of the rational self-limiting behavior a responsible adult ought to show has resulted in wars, catastrophic oil spills, economic collapse. -And, I would point out, an un-trustworthy medical establishment.
The problem is that psychopaths are basically humans which never grew emotional capacities beyond those of a toddler. They cannot differentiate between themselves and the rest of the world. They WANT and they NEED, self-interest on over-drive, and all they did upon maturing is learn how to manipulate the world into delivering a constant, endless and beyond-reason stream of resources down their gullet.
In that way, Greed destroys and is, in fact, a disease, not to be mistaken for common self-interest.
And finally. . , the comparative comments made by that Friedman guy regarding Soviet Russia must be recognized as irrelevant. There's a big difference between mandating control measures to weed out psychopaths and corrupt behavior known to cause systematic failure (like the housing market melt-down), and a social experiment which tried to control all aspects of a population's self expression via centralized government. Those two animals are not the same, but it's easy to fool people with the comparison.
Friedman asks, "Where are you going to find the angels?"
Those ascending to positions of power need to be tested for sociopathy. That would be a BIG step.
-FL
I have no idea what your comment means, but it's modded insightful so I have to respond.
You don't understand but you cannot resist filling the air with your redundant opinions anyway? Jeezuz. There are several names for people like you.
The reality is that the diseases that vaccinations prevent are far more horrible than you can imagine, probably because you've grown up in a world without them. Parents who do not vaccinate their children are irresponsible. They are blind to what these diseases do because when they grew up the diseases barely existed in countries with vaccination (if at all). By not vaccinating your children you not only risk their lives but you risk the lives of countless others. The reasoning behind the choices of not to vaccinate are largely based on pseudoscience and absurd.
Uh huh. Thank-you for repeating the standard argument which has been uttered a million times before. Do you imagine that I've never heard it or that a simple re-application is going to convince anybody who has taken the time to look beyond its simplicity? Is that really how your world works? Repeating something until it blots out any awkward and uncomfortable realities?
Now, please read SLOWLY and try to understand the following. . .
Vaccines are a GOOD idea. Full stop.
The people today who produce, promote, sell and administer them are NOT trust-worthy. They are by degrees non-critical true-believers who render themselves incapable of preventing or solving the problems created by those who are deceptive or even merely incompetent.
Those two concepts are not the same, and repeating the first loudly doesn't make the other go away, nor will it. And it was this constant repeating that I was pointing out with my initial statement, (the statement you failed to understand). The irony here is as thick as peanut butter.
-FL
No. The history and empirical evidence is that vaccines work very well, with very few side effects.
As I said, vaccines are a great idea. But did you not pay attention during the debacle of the last flu season? Billions of dollars changed hands and the vaccine caused much of the reported damage.
Sure, Polio is a great thing to wave goodbye to. But many decades have passed, the people have changed and the product and the marketing and the intentions behind them are no longer singular.
History and empirical evidence doesn't just point to the things you want them to point to. That's a variation of confirmation bias. You have to observe the big picture, because like it or not, greed is in effect and population-wide jabs, which so many people literally become enraged at the slightest suggestion that they should be re-considered, are an excellent way to subdue and control a population.
-FL
I beg to differ. Q was definitely a psychopath if I ever saw one
Q's was the, "Other". And would you let Q inject you with anything?
-FL
But a rational examination and sifting through all the mountains of history and empirical evidence tells us that we simply cannot trust the people who make, promote, sell and administer these drugs.
I'd love to live in a Star Trek reality, where you can trust government and where everybody is truly striving through the application of honest science toward the very best we can be as a species. But there is no greed in Star Trek, and no psychopaths in power and no survival of the sneakiest doctrine in effect at all times.
Our world is not a sane and sensible Star Trek world, and to pretend otherwise, as much as our geek hearts may desire it, is suicidally naive.
-FL
This does not validate the views of the anti-vaccination brigade.
I wonder how often and loudly you'll need to repeat that in order for it to maintain its buffering effect against reality...
-FL
Citations please? Someone has been watching too much Fidel Castro or something.
Really? You're not going to spend like thirty seconds on Google and consider your lack of familiarity with common knowledge to be a valid debating point? Your choice.
Food insecurity:
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/101/1/e3
http://www.frac.org/html/hunger_in_the_us/hunger_index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/18/opinion/18wed2.html
http://jn.nutrition.org/cgi/content/full/129/2/510S
Medical coverage:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_the_United_States
(Just follow the damned links.)
Education:
http://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CBcQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fnces.ed.gov%2Fpubs2005%2F2005021.pdf&rct=j&q=comparison%20of%20education%20in%20the%20united%20states%20to%20other%20countries&ei=9d-KTIjRBISdlgeC7KmsCQ&usg=AFQjCNHg2XP3uyuKjnED6uGl91FHXaS17g&cad=rja
I should also mention that the U.S. has the highest rate of incarceration per capita on the planet, but I'll let you look that one up yourself.
-FL
You know, the same general terms you threw around like "life in Iraq wasn't anywhere nearly as bad as the Western press dictated". I was specifically talking about South Western media, but whatever. Really, I was using your generalization, and I was there in 07.
So you were seeing a post-Saddam Iraq, with its infrastructure bombed to oblivion and its social networks torn apart by war. I imagine there are relatively few places on the planet which wouldn't seem better by comparison. By contrast, the Iraqi I was talking described a country BEFORE the 2003 invasion, and before the trade sanctions went into effect back in 1990. A very different country than the one you experienced.
Or other great crap you wrote like "a "brutal dictator" to us is a "king" to others. And the West, given its lack of wisdom and total inability to govern itself with any degree of humanity, has no business marching about trumpeting who should and should not be allowed to exist in the modern world."
Really, I don't remember the last time we executed a woman for having sex, or whipped her for being in public without covering her face.
Can you name some Western atrocities? Sure. No place is perfect. But the utter lack of common sense from people like you is appalling.
I think you're confusing common sense with Pavlovian responses. Even during times of economic prosperity in the U.S. MILLIONS of people starve, go without medical care, education, because that's how our capitalist value system works. It's a human atrocity. Would you like to be invaded because another country might want to "reach out" (i.e., Bomb the living shit out of the very people they profess to be 'rescuing').
Basically, you got played. The government and the media played on your sympathies, and you got conned. Iraq wasn't saved. It's been reduced to a smoking shit hole and a small group of people made a LOT of money as a direct result. And why? Because people with good hearts weren't smart enough to see that an evil government was manipulating them.
Sorry for the bad news. Are man enough to look it in the face or are you going to continue lying to yourself?
-FL
Now that Wikileaks has been firmly established as the rebel hero of truth and justice, (Go Big Media Owned By. . . who?), and any information bubbling up from saint Julian's hard drive gets to skip past all vetting processes. . .
Would it be any surprise if new "Leaked" documents happened to contain somewhere within them evidence that Iran is deserving of a good bombing?
Remember; you heard it here first.
-FL