She's stolen a life from him and his family by escaping, adding further insult to their pain.
No, she stole a life by killing. Escaping revenge is actually a worthy act; revenge is hateful and the law is not supposed to be a tool of hatred. Rather, payment for a stolen life is the rational way we ought to conduct ourselves.
It is important to get our priorities straight. In this matter, I think that by removing a mother and a grandmother would be destructive to another family, and thus entirely counter-productive. If the law could not catch her within a certain time frame, and if during that time frame, this woman has become a productive and giving member of society, then imprisoning her now would do far more harm than good. The murdered man cannot be un-murdered; it is past and it may be sad, but doing further damage does not increase the wealth and happiness of the future. --If she truly is a giving person well acclimated to society, then assigning her to perform daily community service for the next twenty years would be a much better way to exact payment. Revenge and hate and punishment are wrong way of looking at this.
Maybe prison is meant to be *punishment*, and no, I don't think she's done her time if she was in fact guilty.
Punishment? No, you mean Revenge.
Revenge is about hate.
The supposed purpose of the police system is to ensure that people are free of fear and hate. That we are safe to live in peace. Prison is supposed to remove people from society as long as they pose a threat, and it is meant to rehabilitate people so that they can lead peaceful lives. That is the end purpose of the law. That is the way we protect ourselves.
Without knowing more about the woman and the life she has lived, we cannot judge. Perhaps she was being abused and her killing the man was an accidental result of self-defense. Or perhaps she was a jealous lunatic. Or perhaps she really was falsely accused. We do not know. But I DO know that revenge is not why I pay taxes. If this woman today poses no threat, if she has become a giving person who helps society, then containing her and ruining her psyche in a prison system which has a lousy track record of actually rehabilitating people, then what has happened here is a step backwards.
You cannot un-kill people. The past is the past, and it may be very sad. But the future is not well served through revenge and further acts of hate. As Gandhi put it, "An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind."
-FL
Fox? Fox is evil. Fox is a Neocon shill honeypot.
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Joss Whedon Back on TV
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Firefly died because, in my jaded view, it was saying, "Government Bad. Rebels Good."
And now he's launching a story which deals with the Greenbaum Material (I wonder if he researched this, or if he's flying on, "don't know why exactly, but this topic fascinates me" instinct.
Basically, unless he comes out with an endless pro-torture message like Alias or 24 and similar, which based on Joss' history, I think is highly unlikely, this show is going to get snuffed.
My guess is that the only reason he's working with Fox is that "it just sort of all pointed that way" --they wooed him so that Dollhouse could be developed, backwatered and then canceled so that it can't achieve social relevance on some other network which isn't all about the suppression of truth.
Joss is brilliant, but he could use more insight. The only two reasons to work with Fox are if you are evil, or if you are ignorant. Fox News shows the network bias.
You think anyone who doesn't agree with your warped UFO evidence peddling writers is a fool.
No. I only think that you specifically are a fool because:
A. You judge evidence without looking at it first. It is a universally accepted truth that only fools behave in this manner. --You even steadfastly declared that you would NOT look, while struggling to manufacture the thinnest of reasons to justify this behavior. (Heck, if you would look at the last example I posted, you would see that your most current excuse has been addressed and in fact agreed with!)
B. You make endless faulty arguments and when the faults are pointed out, rather than respond to those points you instead merely present brand new faulty arguments which do not take into account the points previously raised. You have not exhibited the capacity to learn from or even recognize your own mistakes.
C. When offered concrete examples and reasoning, you simply ignore them.
D. You are rude and until your most recent posts, largely incoherent, and when it was pointed out that this was damaging to both your arguments and your credibility, you got huffy and accusatory as though I am somehow at fault for not wanting to accept gibberish and insults.
That's four strikes against you. --Whereas all you have offered in return is to continue throwing around broken arguments, to continue calling me names, and now, apparently, to accuse me of elitism because I had the audacity to point out when and how you were not making any sense.
I am clearly wasting my efforts in attempting to answer your questions and accusations; rather than listening and responding to my answers, you hide from them behind flimsy excuses and throw profanity at me.
--Though I am certain you will be able to pretend that you emerged victorious. Self-delusion is wonderfully comforting that way; it is in fact the only choice available to those who refuse to look at evidence and who prefer instead to live exclusively inside the safety and comfort of their own minds. (Armchair logic.) This is ultimately self-destructive, but that's fine by me. Goodbye now.
Now...as far as your unending insults to my intelligunce fer not typin lik you want. I will first point out that your language/intelligence nonsense is completely garbage and was debunked in the 60s I believe. I'm too lazy to go dig out the specific reference at the moment, but that leads to my second point. I am not exactly investing a great deal of energy into this, as I said, it amuses me.
It amuses you to present yourself as an ignoramus who says patently stupid things in trailer-park sentence structure? --And then complain when somebody points out the fact? Bullshit.
I am aware of the arguments against the language/intelligence connection, but the honest truth is that you were making stupid arguments which were easily pulled apart while writing as though you were mildly retarded. I see a connection, and so do you, otherwise you wouldn't have brushed up your presentation of yourself while asking, perhaps, the first sensible question since you began posting on this thread.
And that question would be. ..
Care explain how to sort out how you choose who to trust? I mean really...if the governments are hiding things, why the hell would they release the truth with FOIA papers?
An excellent thing to ask, and something which I have spent countless hours pondering. The best answer I have come up with is that there IS no easy answer. You simply have to take it case by case, and never let yourself get lazy in your constant questioning of the world. If you had a copy of the book in question, you would see that the information offers ample room for cross-analysis and I wouldn't even have to elaborate, but. ..
In one case in September of 1959, there was a sighting by a police officer named Robert Dickerson of a large, bright object which descended over the city, stopped abruptly and hovered two hundred feet above the ground. (His record of the event was entered into his log book, and is a public document, so that's document #1.) He drove to the Federal Aviation Administration office at the Redmond airport. (Over which the object was hovering). He and others at the airport watched the object through binoculars, describing it to the press (public document #2) as flat and round with tongues of 'flame' extending from its edge. The FAA reported the object to the Hamilton Air Force Base in California. Six F-102 jets were scrambled to intercept. Witnesses were watching as the jets arrived. As the jets approached, the object squelched its 'tongues of flame' emitted a fiery exhaust and shot up into the air at incredible speed. It was so close to the path of the jets that two of them nearly lost control, swerving to avoid being struck. One pilot using gunsight radar, continued the chase, but the object abruptly changed course -- an event tracked by the Klamath Falls Ground Control Intercept radar station, and the pilot gave up. For two hours afterwards, the object continued to register on radar, performing high-speed maneuvers at altitudes between six thousand and fifty-four thousand feet.
Pilots immediately received an intelligence debriefing and were ordered not to discuss the matter, even among themselves. But people had seen the jets and reported the object. Forced to make an explanation, the Air Force reported publicly that the flight of F-102s had been a routine investigation caused by false radar returns and that the orange glow had been imagined by witnesses.
The FAA, however, was reported to be checking for abnormal radiation where the object had done its 'blast off' and people asked why they would be doing this for a false radar reading. The Air Force changed its story; That the object was probably a weather balloon. The problem here was that the nation's leading civilian UFO investigation group, (NICAP) had obtained certified copies of the FAA logs of the event which showed that the object had been moving at enormous speeds and had evaded the interceptor jets. The logs also included air force confirmations of the jets being scrambled as
But listening to you cry about how more educated you are and proper you are while going on about aliens on slashdot is too amusing!
Who said anything about being more educated? That's coming from you. I'm willing to bet you even have more formal education than I do, if you're working with some sort of engineering background as you seem to imply. I do, however, know how to think in straight lines which do not conflict with my own points of argument, and how to communicate these ideas clearly rather than spout garbled, insulting nonsense. --This stuff reflects one's level of intelligence, and one's intelligence plays heavily into one's level of awareness and ability to see reality. If you write like an idiot, and rationalize like an idiot, then it's hardly surprising that you will not be taken seriously. --And worse than that, you cannot form your own cohesive ideas, which means your brain is basically cheese. --And when that is the case, it is hard to even become aware of the fact since your brain is the very organ necessary to determine it's own state. But you can get a start; language and thinking are linked at the hip, so strive to think clearly and build your thoughts clearly, and your mind will begin to order itself from there, after which new areas of awareness and personal power will gradually become more available to you.
I'm interested to see your evidence of "turn on a dime" radar since that isn't exactly how it works, and eye witness turn on a dime is hardly evidence of shit.
Are you really interested? Then go read it. I've already posted the link. --And as I've pointed out, eye witnesses of the type I've described are definitely worth while. --The American Air Force and various government departments linked to this material certainly think so, (there are plenty of official documents which can attest to the fact that the matter is taken very seriously at those levels, and that organized dis-info agents have been tasked with the job of making sure people like you hold exactly the kind of knee-jerk views you have been posting here. This stuff is all on public record. I don't need to make anything up here; the world is far weirder than I could ever hope to generate!).
But seriously, your pattern is not unique, and you shouldn't feel embarrassed about it. Everybody is lied to and manipulated as a matter of course. It's only a problem when people, having been offered a way out, to choose ignorance.
You assume I am angry over your assertions and like every other OMG spaceships nuts I have ever dealt with you assume because I don't agree with any of your silly assertions that I must be in denial and angry.
No, I assumed you were falling apart at the seams because you couldn't form a coherent sentence.
Sure you can string all that shit together in some strange assertions to prove space ships, but the probability in it being mundane is much higher.
You are hardly in a position to decide what is and is not probable, and you won't be until you do some more reading.
The cutting edge military aviation technology we have in the air today is ancient stuff. UAVs didn't just spring up from nowhere, nor did stealth technology...the shit was being developed back in the 60s. Do you really believe we just had a sudden epiphany with this kind of technology and managed to produce it overnight?
You're telling me information which I already know. --You even took the time to spell out the words from which the acronym "UFO" is constructed in your last post. Do you really believe you are the first to think these thoughts? I'm a UFO theorist, for goodness sake! Why on earth would you assume I've not considered these things? Just how foolish have the other UFO guys you've talked to been?
Anyway, as per your point. . , you seem to think that UFO's can be explained by experimental jets. --While I agree that this is probably true in some cases, after one examines the evidence available, suggesting that experimental jets are to blame for the whole show is virtually unthinkable. Consider: sightings of highly maneuverable UFO's date back to the 1940's. This was several years before the first successful nuclear bomb test. Do you really think that experimental jets capable of speeds of thousands of miles per hour and turn-on-a-dime maneuvering was really within the scope of human technology in the 1940's?
There were numerous sightings over much of Europe. Radar accounts also recorded these sightings, so they weren't just figments. Interestingly, it was later learned that each country's government was spooked by the sightings and thought enough of them to take the matter very seriously, thinking that their neighbors were secretly developing high-tech aircraft, not knowing that their neighboring countries in fact all thought the same thing in return about their next door neighbors. As it happens, nobody had ships of those sizes which could move at those kinds of speeds or maneuver in the ways described. It was a mystery, and it didn't go away.
Perhaps you are basing your views on UFO books and similar which were published before the Freedom of Information Act. I don't know. This stuff seems abundant and compelling to me, and the kinds of people who have come forward to tell their stories from within the air force are very hard to deny. The history is all out there, and anybody who looks at it would be amazed. You obviously haven't looked.
I think I've said everything which can be said to you at this point, so unless you have something of value to add other than dumb tin-foil hat jokes and more of your butchered English and school-yard logic, please don't bother responding.
You really are a special kind of crazy. So...I will go ahead and clarify something. UFO - Unidentified Flying Object - EXTREMELY COMMON! Space ships - What the hell ever crazy guy. Yes, there are tons of UFOs sighted, documented, and whatnot. Most are nothing significant. As for your photo nonsense...Photoshop to the rescue! Police, pilots, military officers, and ATC guys may not "play silly hoaxes" but they certainly have a LONG and respected tradition of making monumental mistakes.
When you use the term 'crazy', what you really appear to be saying is that I answered your questions within the bounds of logic. This illustrated how your pre-determined belief is based on faulty thinking which in turn sent you into spasms of outrage and sloppy thinking. (Your opening paragraph is a real winner. Sounds like you're shooting spittle while typing.)
Let's go through point by point. ..
Yes, there are tons of UFOs sighted, documented, and whatnot. Most are nothing significant.
What exactly you are basing your contention that "most are nothing significant" on? What are you referencing? I'm guessing nothing but thin air.
As for your photo nonsense...Photoshop to the rescue!
Huh? You need to go back and read my original response to you regarding photographs, (that is, I said that it was very hard to take a decent photograph of a UFO, which is why there are so few in evidence) and then come back and explain to me how you are making any sense whatsoever by blurting, "Photoshop to the rescue!". Do you think that you have succeeded in answering my point? --You are calling me crazy based on my ideas, but you don't appear to be able to string together fundamental thought components.
Police, pilots, military officers, and ATC guys may not "play silly hoaxes" but they certainly have a LONG and respected tradition of making monumental mistakes.
This is true. But if those instances were the norm, we'd have more planes crashing than landing, which we don't. What we do have are over 400 officially documented multiple-witness accounts (recorded from between 1941-1973). When faced with that, one is forced to question just how much monumental human error can be relied upon to explain the events in question. --And we're talking about machine-recorded events, too. Radar systems log this stuff. Honestly, without having read these events, you simply cannot judge, and when you try to cast it all away as human error, you sound ridiculous to anybody who has bothered to look at the evidence within context.
Oh...and method of travel claimed by the aliens themselves?! How the fuck do the aliens claim anything when their existence is FAR from proven and you go on to argue that abductions are likely lies.
Again, there is far more information available than you are clearly aware of. Instead of cursing and assuming, try asking. --I did not say that abduction stories are likely lies. That is yet more illogical assumption on your part. --A subject cannot lie under hypnosis, but the subconscious can certainly become tangled, and there are very likely parties whom such confusion serves. In any case, the communications I am referring to do not come via abduction victims per se, but rather via channeled material, --another subject which I suspect you know virtually nothing about but which you will nonetheless spit and spasm over rather than take the time to investigate, so it's hardly worth mentioning. All I can say is that many people who have a far firmer grasp upon reason, (as well as grammar and social grace) than you do have accepted that such material is well worth considering. Perhaps you should take the cue.
As far as test flights being ordered to buzz things...you have CLEARLY never EVER met a fighter pilot...let alone a fighter pilot selected for the uber secret top of the field test pilot designation. You will be hard pressed to find a fighter pilot that HASN'T done something monumentally stupid they were told not to
The two things which have kept me away from Alphasmart have been. . .
1. The small LCD screen. --I find it very hard to write on something where I cannot see the whole paragraph I'm working on. And. . .
2. Their outrageous prices. $600 for a keyboard and a very small LCD screen? What's that? Like $10 in parts? --It was obviously a greed-inspired ploy to sell lots of units to schools on government contracts. This seemed criminal enough that I swore I'd never buy one of their products until their pricing dropped to non-criminal levels. The funny thing is that they panicked with these new small notebooks coming out, like the OLPC, and dropped their prices so that they're only making a 2000% profit, but even in so doing, they are not a company with even a shred of actual altruism.
The only two things Alphasmart has going for it are battery life and a big keyboard. But their business practice still makes me want to drop them like a warm bag of shit, and I sincerely hope their business goes belly up. Also, I picked up a used HP Jonada810 for my portable word processing, and it does a great job. The 4 hour battery life on that thing suits me just fine, since I'm rarely away from a power outlet for that long.
So, depending on the keyboard qualities, I'll either be picking up one of ASUS' machines or an OLPC. --And I don't think I'd mind taking a small tech disadvantage (if there is one), so that I can make sure that when I buy a machine, a kid somewhere can benefit from a free laptop. Connecting the world is a great idea!
"required to keep records" means about squat. So you are going to tell me that people required to keep records makes it legit? What about the people required to keep records of the cooling systems of the nuclear subs that all just got fired recently for pencil whipping all the reports.
Of course all systems are open to human fault, but given the systems we have available, the requirement for say, an air traffic controller to record a weird event, in combination with a pilots' experience of the same event, in combination with a police officer on the ground writing down his experience of the same event leaves a documented pattern which can be referenced later with much greater clarity than that of a couple of regular people walking home at night who saw something but who wrote nothing down at all. So no, I must completely disagree with you. Records in these instances do not mean "squat" just because some submarine maintenance people pretended to record numbers on a cooling system they were too lazy to go and actually look at. Jeez. That'd be like a cop pretending to see a UFO and then writing it down in his official daily report. How much sense does that make?
Second...lets do some basic rational thought about the Area 51 business.
Nobody's arguing about the existence of experimental jets. But if you want to ask basic rational questions, then you need to first know the data, which you clearly do not, (and which is why I recommend people read up on this stuff before spouting off.) --That is, sightings began in earnest in 1941 by the hundreds with the introduction of radar and heavy military air traffic. --It is assumed, and indeed there is evidence of activity prior to this, but 1941 is were the military and secret services began to take interest. This happened over all developed nations. So assuming, as you appear to be saying, that the sightings are the result of test flights of experimental jets, then it would be required that we were developing technology far, far beyond that which we had available to us in the 1940's. --The behavior of the sightings, I should add, remains consistent between then and now; the UFO's haven't gotten faster or more maneuverable as the decades have passed.
Secondly. . . Why on earth would test flights from a place like Area 51, for instance, be ordered to buzz commercial and military flights, sometimes even leading to their destruction? You have to stretch fairly far in order for that to make sense.
That having been said...lets examine aliens.
Ah. More of your 'rational thought', eh? Well, let's see what you offer up. ..
So...a group that has managed Interstellar travel and avoidance of all the thousands of eyes we have in the sky from hobbyist astronomers are sneaking past, ACCIDENTALLY getting caught flying low over populated areas, and in some accounts performing abductions and odd medical things that are rather primitive even by our standards? Explain to me exactly where ANY of that makes an ounce of sense?
It's really not that complicated.
First of all, you said it yourself; "possibly Inter-dimensional travel". This is actually the purported mode claimed by the aliens themselves, and it would certainly explain why many UFO's are capable of blinking into and out of existence and performing various maneuvers which appear impossible by our standards of navigation; when time is a vector, then our experience of an object poking through from another layer of reality would be peculiar indeed. --Though, there is also certainly evidence of objects appearing and remaining as objects in our layer of reality, both on earth and out in the solar system. How many moons does Jupiter have now? --I am not saying that every new moon is a hidden space platform, but it does offer a valid counterpoint to your question. I should also mention that there are a number of objects in very close orbit around the Sun which have been noticed, as well as objects which orbit the Sun in the Earth's wake. --Ju
If they cannot cover-up even something stupid like this, they are hardly up to the level of a James Bond super-villain. They're all idiots.
I wish that were the case. The public has fallen many times for scams which are just as incredibly dumb. (Diebold, anybody? WMD's? Peek oil? Heck, the entire FOX News structure. The list is endless.) FEMA had every reason to believe that they'd get away with it. I know guys who work in journalism, and the bullshit which doesn't get called out is hair raising.
Give Endgame a watch and see what you think. --The first third of the film is a bit juvenile, but once you get past that, it starts to offer up some fascinating points. (I didn't know that Bill Gates was a eugenics proponent. Ick.)
Endgame is up on Google Video as well as major public torrents.
This film seemed kinda juvenile for the first third, but then got progressively more informative.
I still think Alex Jones is leaving out huge tracts of vital information, namely the alien element, which makes me wonder if he's not part of the agenda on some level, though the data he's presenting is still certainly useful to recognize. Another thought is that perhaps Jones is deliberately avoiding certain areas because he knows most people automatically shut down when discussion ventures too far from 'normal', and he's aware that he's already pushing most people's boundaries as it is with this relatively simple stuff. Michael Moore is similar in this regard. I know one or two documentarians, and they struggle with this stuff; where do you create your boundaries? You can't deal with everything even though you want to. In any case, the things people fear most to talk about openly are those which are most important in the big picture.
For those who can't deal with the whole alien thing, I generally offer up Richard Dolan's work, which provides the first step by simply establishing the existence of UFO's through excruciating evidence provided in over 400 multiple-witness accounts of UFO's as reported by military officers, police and pilots, (no civilians), --all people who are required to make official records of their encounters. After that, there are more curious elements at work which can be examined, but most people will simply never be able to break through their programming to deal even with the most basic layers of this information. People are too frightened of getting laughed at. Sad, really, that people will avoid looking for such silly reasons, but it happens all the time.
It's really hard to take seriously a video that begins by misspelling the speaker's name (Naomi Wolf) as "Noami". Are these the kind of people I'd feel comfortable associating myself with? People who, instead of presenting a reasoned written argument, can only say "ya, you should, like, watch this video"?
Oh please. Naomi Wolf didn't cut the video together herself. I know plenty of people all over the political spectrum who make typos, and far worse, so that's an exceptionally lame excuse for not wanting to listen to a lecture. If you don't like the material being discussed, why not just say so rather than find excuses to avoid listening? --Or maybe, (horrors), offer up your own 'reasoned argument' for why you think the material is at fault. --I've written many hundreds of such arguments in my time, so I figured it couldn't hurt to hear it from another person's perspective. --I thought she did a pretty succinct job, although a little more confidence at the end of her speech might have been appropriate.
Been watching too much BBC , haven't we ? And they say Americans are ignorant...
BBC? Wrong country, eh?
And no, I've been watching Michael Moore, (Sicko) which I would recommend to anybody. And my question about Bush leaving is, I hope very much, rhetorical, because the other possibility means shooting and prison camps for those who wouldn't like the idea of him staying on. But thanks so much for your input.
Damn these Democrats. They seem like such an amazing bunch of yes-man buffoons only pretending to do their jobs! They've dropped the ball in congress, doing exactly NOTHING about Iraq, and Hillary seems like more of the same bullshit, reflecting this wishy-washy do-nothing approach while offering lots of supplicating words. Plus I wouldn't be surprised to see her nuke Iran. This Ron Paul guy, however, the one which Fox is trying to destroy, at least, sounds earnest. But is that for real or is it just more smoke and mirrors?
FOX taking it on the chin(part 1) and part 2 and Any thoughts on Ron Paul? He's against national health care, but I can almost let that go as it sounds like normal dyed in the wool Republican logic. If you could somehow combine Ron Paul and Clinton into a single candidate. . . Aw hell, is it even possible to have an actual vote anymore? Is Bush even planning to leave office in 2008?
Sheesh. You Americans have me all worked up with your politics. I have work to do, damn it!
Revolutions only happen when the people are cold and starving.
That's it. They'll put up with enormous shit otherwise. So if you keep up the flow of cheeseburgers and TV, the dictators will rule forever. --Or until such a time as the rest of the world decides to invade or the whole system is so totally sucked dry that it collapses with a dry wheeze like Russia did at the end of the cold war. Yep, it's a grim situation. But it gets worse. . .
I'm not convinced that this is all about just simple control. Has anybody noticed there seem to be a lot more rocks falling out of the sky recently? I sure have. There's bigger stuff at stake here. All those miles of barbed wire enclosures don't get built for nothing. The next ten months are going to be interesting, to say the least. I hope for one of two things; that people wake the hell up and throw Bush and Cheney and crew in prison forever and reinstate a real government, or that we have a really, really good TV season in 2008 and that McDonnald's has a two for one special, because it's not just FEMA, --this Blackwater thing operating on American soil is totally freaky.
Excellent Youtube video [youtube.com] dealing with this stuff. . .
I cannot remember who I'm quoting here, but I seem to think it was Clive Barker or Neil Gaimen, or Neil Gaimen quoting Clive Barker. . , "I remember clearly the moment that I realized I would never understand the Japanese. I happened to come across one of their pornography magazines and I flipped it open. It was filled with pictures of beautiful naked girls in various poses. Intrigued, I turned to the centerfold. The picture there was of a large pile of dead dogs. That was the moment when I realized I would never understand the Japanese." (It was probably Gaiman, now that I write it.)
--My moment of epiphany was when I saw a documentary interest piece which covered a Japanese punk rock convention. Some convention organizer had painted a white line on the ground, and there was this long row of about two hundred guys and girls all dressed up in fab punk-gear with spikes and pink mohawks and such, all of them standing shoulder to shoulder with their toes neatly and orderly at the line --all of them fiercely bobbing their heads to The Clash or whoever.
It made my heart break so see such deeply programmed respect for the invisible whip of social control. People are heavily, heavily programmed over here as well, but the level of emotional repression and fear of authority is nowhere nearly as nuts.
My family came from people such as these who immigrated from Scotland.
Grrr, yourself. We all descended from somewhere and it's fine to take pride in your roots. But Cape Breton is a world unto itself, and anybody who argues that doesn't know any Cape Bretoners. Pointing out its characteristics is not a comment on the quality of the people. It's simply a recognition of the culture as the people living it have chosen to manifest. And it's not the people living in Cape Breton who are calling the shots on building a space port. It's the federal government.
So, why haven't they taken Randi's One Million Dollars from him to buy more Aeron chairs?
What? And ruin Randi's career? The guy's a stage performer with a huge ego on the line. He can't afford to lose this bet, and so he won't. Reading through some of the lengths he goes to in order to avoid fair testing is entertaining. One of my favorites was a very rude letter he wrote to one fellow accusing him of lying without even agreeing to look at the evidence offered or do any preliminary testing. That's hardly scientific.
Yeah, there are lots of scam artists and willfully deluded people out there, and his little challenge was an interesting way to expose them. Kudos. But seriously; anybody with half a brain knows the game is still rigged. Randi functions from the assumption that it's all smoke and mirrors. His model and his mind can't handle the real thing, and so it never will.
In this world, you experience that which you ask for.
Those who cleave to a materialistic view of the universe tend to experience a universe where it's just creaking floor boards and easily fooled people who reinforce the belief that the guy who watches the Discovery Channel is the smartest ego in the room. --The multiple balls of light which enter through windows and buzz the household, and the collective blackout experiences which leave the family stunned and all the clocks running backwards, and the dozens of piles of shit appearing from nowhere all over the house shortly before it bursts into flames and burns to the ground. . . Such events seem to happen only to those who have chosen to allow such things to exist in their world views.
I've dealt with a load of events which don't fit into the orthodox view of reality. One of my favorites was the weird-looking spider my girlfriend found in the kitchen which when she coaxed it on to a piece of paper, ran around in alarm, stopped and then dissolved into a small pile of sand. --That and the burning tree which had fallen across the street amidst a tangle of downed power lines, but which vanished with no trace a few minutes later, only to re-appear shortly afterwards, and then vanish again. This is a very weird universe, but yeah, people can avoid experiencing the things which don't fit their belief systems if that's what they choose. Fear often has a lot to do with it. --I've seen on a few occasion orthodox believers experience things which don't fit, and rather than deal with the fall-out, just refuse to think or talk about the events. But that's probably my own belief system exerting itself; smug people being shaken up happens around me from time to time.
Yes. Glace Bay and Sydney Mines are the picture of Shire-like charm. That is, at the end of the books. You know, the part where it's completely fucked up.
More of those coffin nails, hammered in earlier last century. Cocaine use is also a problem in certain areas. Sigh. Cape Breton has been under attack for a while now.
Please, no. I like Cape Breton the way it is. It's one of the last holdouts of Shire-like charm and backwardness, where the old, old grandmas of Gaelic descent will tell you that when the electric light came, all the women lost the second sight. If you put a frickin' launch pad in the middle of that, the coffin lid will have another dozen nails pounded home. No thanks. Leave lumbering, ultra-expensive space exploration and spy-satellite deployment to the Americans. We built that ridiculous arm already. That was cute. Like playing in one of those, "Drop the Egg Robot Olympics", but this retarded project is about asking Lockheed Martin to build toxic tinker-toys in the back yard where all the prettiest trees live. No thanks, Mordor.
Stupid Feds. Put my tax dollars into libraries, bike paths and food inspection agents who are trained to say "No" to hormone laden milk and GMO crops. Thank you.
Are you familiar with Ingo Swann's work? He has a couple books out on the subject of Power - Secrets of Power Vol. I, Vol. II, Reality Boxes, Wisdom Category. Very high-level books - I have them, but can't read them yet.
I did a bit of scoping about on this fellow and it appears that Ingo Swann has a tendency toward uncritical analysis. This is especially apparent with his fervent regard for the subject of the Virgin Mary, about which he has written extensively. Apparitions of Mary don't really interest me; for the most part I think they fall into three categories; 1. Communications from positive higher beings which use the umbrella imagery of Mary because this is what those people who are calling out want to see and can understand. 2. Misleading apparitions produced by negative forces trying to mislead people, (I'd guess at least half of 'legitimate' sightings are like this), and 3. Apparitions which come about as a result of energies in the area being focused by the viewers themselves. In any case, I find that the whole subject lives rather in the land of Elvis on black velvet and it just doesn't interest me a whole lot. The positive sightings are meant for people who function in very different ways than I do. For my part, there are far more useful ways to spend my time and energy than chasing after visions bearing little significance and which serve to cement people in Christian cultism. Maybe it's useful for some people, but it's certainly not my path.
As for Swann. . . His interpreting appearances of Mary as being warnings about the threat of Communism, seems really flaky and politically self-serving, and those are the kinds of alarm bells I listen to. Swann strikes me as being a well-meaning but self-deluding fellow who has mistaken his interesting but likely over-stated psychic abilities to mean far more than they really do. I suspect that he is manipulated on some level, (this happens often when people are prone to wishful thinking and low self-criticism), to spread confusion which in the end keeps people from collecting real knowledge. More harm than good. Flakiness has a certain feel and smell to it which remains fairly constant, and Swann sems rather smelly to me.
This isn't to say that he is not worth reading. He probably does have some useful things to say, and such characters can serve as good exercises in critical thinking, but I don't think I'd bother. There are far more interesting books and sources out there where the bullshit levels ring in much lower.
Those are my thoughts, anyway. Every path is different.
One day, all the Christians float bodily into the sky, leaving all the unbelievers left to muddle their way around on the Earth's surface, where things fall quickly into chaos. Magic works and some people even turn into vampires and demon-horn people.
The story flows, with people dealing with the sudden possibility that, "God is real and he doesn't love me! I got Left Behind(tm)"
Then at the end, it turns out that this quadrant of the galaxy went through a paradigm shift which altered the laws of physics and allowed the energies of the human race to express themselves directly. --Turns out that there is now a big ring of dead people around the planet. --The Christian belief of 'rising into the heavens' manifested literally and they all died from lack of oxygen and turned into space junk.
This might be closer to the truth than people realize, albeit in a metaphorical sense. But then my own belief system is abnormal by all counts, one aspect of which is that the whole religion scam is designed deliberately to keep people from believing in and using their own innate power.
Who needs a savior? Don't surrender your own growth and power waiting around for somebody else to take care of you. I suspect that was one of Christ's original and uncorrupted messages which got edited out by power-hungery guys in tall hats who needed lots of slave labor for their free meal ticket. --I bet Christ had the mind of a researcher; you can't evolve the spirit if you don't question and explore the limits of your being.
Slashdot Mirror
No, she stole a life by killing. Escaping revenge is actually a worthy act; revenge is hateful and the law is not supposed to be a tool of hatred. Rather, payment for a stolen life is the rational way we ought to conduct ourselves.
It is important to get our priorities straight. In this matter, I think that by removing a mother and a grandmother would be destructive to another family, and thus entirely counter-productive. If the law could not catch her within a certain time frame, and if during that time frame, this woman has become a productive and giving member of society, then imprisoning her now would do far more harm than good. The murdered man cannot be un-murdered; it is past and it may be sad, but doing further damage does not increase the wealth and happiness of the future. --If she truly is a giving person well acclimated to society, then assigning her to perform daily community service for the next twenty years would be a much better way to exact payment. Revenge and hate and punishment are wrong way of looking at this.
-FL
Punishment? No, you mean Revenge.
Revenge is about hate.
The supposed purpose of the police system is to ensure that people are free of fear and hate. That we are safe to live in peace. Prison is supposed to remove people from society as long as they pose a threat, and it is meant to rehabilitate people so that they can lead peaceful lives. That is the end purpose of the law. That is the way we protect ourselves.
Without knowing more about the woman and the life she has lived, we cannot judge. Perhaps she was being abused and her killing the man was an accidental result of self-defense. Or perhaps she was a jealous lunatic. Or perhaps she really was falsely accused. We do not know. But I DO know that revenge is not why I pay taxes. If this woman today poses no threat, if she has become a giving person who helps society, then containing her and ruining her psyche in a prison system which has a lousy track record of actually rehabilitating people, then what has happened here is a step backwards.
You cannot un-kill people. The past is the past, and it may be very sad. But the future is not well served through revenge and further acts of hate. As Gandhi put it, "An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind."
-FL
And now he's launching a story which deals with the Greenbaum Material (I wonder if he researched this, or if he's flying on, "don't know why exactly, but this topic fascinates me" instinct.
Basically, unless he comes out with an endless pro-torture message like Alias or 24 and similar, which based on Joss' history, I think is highly unlikely, this show is going to get snuffed.
My guess is that the only reason he's working with Fox is that "it just sort of all pointed that way" --they wooed him so that Dollhouse could be developed, backwatered and then canceled so that it can't achieve social relevance on some other network which isn't all about the suppression of truth.
Joss is brilliant, but he could use more insight. The only two reasons to work with Fox are if you are evil, or if you are ignorant. Fox News shows the network bias.
-FL
No. I only think that you specifically are a fool because:
A. You judge evidence without looking at it first. It is a universally accepted truth that only fools behave in this manner. --You even steadfastly declared that you would NOT look, while struggling to manufacture the thinnest of reasons to justify this behavior. (Heck, if you would look at the last example I posted, you would see that your most current excuse has been addressed and in fact agreed with!)
B. You make endless faulty arguments and when the faults are pointed out, rather than respond to those points you instead merely present brand new faulty arguments which do not take into account the points previously raised. You have not exhibited the capacity to learn from or even recognize your own mistakes.
C. When offered concrete examples and reasoning, you simply ignore them.
D. You are rude and until your most recent posts, largely incoherent, and when it was pointed out that this was damaging to both your arguments and your credibility, you got huffy and accusatory as though I am somehow at fault for not wanting to accept gibberish and insults.
That's four strikes against you. --Whereas all you have offered in return is to continue throwing around broken arguments, to continue calling me names, and now, apparently, to accuse me of elitism because I had the audacity to point out when and how you were not making any sense.
I am clearly wasting my efforts in attempting to answer your questions and accusations; rather than listening and responding to my answers, you hide from them behind flimsy excuses and throw profanity at me.
--Though I am certain you will be able to pretend that you emerged victorious. Self-delusion is wonderfully comforting that way; it is in fact the only choice available to those who refuse to look at evidence and who prefer instead to live exclusively inside the safety and comfort of their own minds. (Armchair logic.) This is ultimately self-destructive, but that's fine by me. Goodbye now.
-FL
Now...as far as your unending insults to my intelligunce fer not typin lik you want. I will first point out that your language/intelligence nonsense is completely garbage and was debunked in the 60s I believe. I'm too lazy to go dig out the specific reference at the moment, but that leads to my second point. I am not exactly investing a great deal of energy into this, as I said, it amuses me.
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It amuses you to present yourself as an ignoramus who says patently stupid things in trailer-park sentence structure? --And then complain when somebody points out the fact? Bullshit.
I am aware of the arguments against the language/intelligence connection, but the honest truth is that you were making stupid arguments which were easily pulled apart while writing as though you were mildly retarded. I see a connection, and so do you, otherwise you wouldn't have brushed up your presentation of yourself while asking, perhaps, the first sensible question since you began posting on this thread.
And that question would be. .
Care explain how to sort out how you choose who to trust? I mean really...if the governments are hiding things, why the hell would they release the truth with FOIA papers?
An excellent thing to ask, and something which I have spent countless hours pondering. The best answer I have come up with is that there IS no easy answer. You simply have to take it case by case, and never let yourself get lazy in your constant questioning of the world. If you had a copy of the book in question, you would see that the information offers ample room for cross-analysis and I wouldn't even have to elaborate, but. .
In one case in September of 1959, there was a sighting by a police officer named Robert Dickerson of a large, bright object which descended over the city, stopped abruptly and hovered two hundred feet above the ground. (His record of the event was entered into his log book, and is a public document, so that's document #1.) He drove to the Federal Aviation Administration office at the Redmond airport. (Over which the object was hovering). He and others at the airport watched the object through binoculars, describing it to the press (public document #2) as flat and round with tongues of 'flame' extending from its edge. The FAA reported the object to the Hamilton Air Force Base in California. Six F-102 jets were scrambled to intercept. Witnesses were watching as the jets arrived. As the jets approached, the object squelched its 'tongues of flame' emitted a fiery exhaust and shot up into the air at incredible speed. It was so close to the path of the jets that two of them nearly lost control, swerving to avoid being struck. One pilot using gunsight radar, continued the chase, but the object abruptly changed course -- an event tracked by the Klamath Falls Ground Control Intercept radar station, and the pilot gave up. For two hours afterwards, the object continued to register on radar, performing high-speed maneuvers at altitudes between six thousand and fifty-four thousand feet.
Pilots immediately received an intelligence debriefing and were ordered not to discuss the matter, even among themselves. But people had seen the jets and reported the object. Forced to make an explanation, the Air Force reported publicly that the flight of F-102s had been a routine investigation caused by false radar returns and that the orange glow had been imagined by witnesses.
The FAA, however, was reported to be checking for abnormal radiation where the object had done its 'blast off' and people asked why they would be doing this for a false radar reading. The Air Force changed its story; That the object was probably a weather balloon. The problem here was that the nation's leading civilian UFO investigation group, (NICAP) had obtained certified copies of the FAA logs of the event which showed that the object had been moving at enormous speeds and had evaded the interceptor jets. The logs also included air force confirmations of the jets being scrambled as
Who said anything about being more educated? That's coming from you. I'm willing to bet you even have more formal education than I do, if you're working with some sort of engineering background as you seem to imply. I do, however, know how to think in straight lines which do not conflict with my own points of argument, and how to communicate these ideas clearly rather than spout garbled, insulting nonsense. --This stuff reflects one's level of intelligence, and one's intelligence plays heavily into one's level of awareness and ability to see reality. If you write like an idiot, and rationalize like an idiot, then it's hardly surprising that you will not be taken seriously. --And worse than that, you cannot form your own cohesive ideas, which means your brain is basically cheese. --And when that is the case, it is hard to even become aware of the fact since your brain is the very organ necessary to determine it's own state. But you can get a start; language and thinking are linked at the hip, so strive to think clearly and build your thoughts clearly, and your mind will begin to order itself from there, after which new areas of awareness and personal power will gradually become more available to you.
I'm interested to see your evidence of "turn on a dime" radar since that isn't exactly how it works, and eye witness turn on a dime is hardly evidence of shit.
Are you really interested? Then go read it. I've already posted the link. --And as I've pointed out, eye witnesses of the type I've described are definitely worth while. --The American Air Force and various government departments linked to this material certainly think so, (there are plenty of official documents which can attest to the fact that the matter is taken very seriously at those levels, and that organized dis-info agents have been tasked with the job of making sure people like you hold exactly the kind of knee-jerk views you have been posting here. This stuff is all on public record. I don't need to make anything up here; the world is far weirder than I could ever hope to generate!).
But seriously, your pattern is not unique, and you shouldn't feel embarrassed about it. Everybody is lied to and manipulated as a matter of course. It's only a problem when people, having been offered a way out, to choose ignorance.
Best of luck.
-FL
No, I assumed you were falling apart at the seams because you couldn't form a coherent sentence.
Sure you can string all that shit together in some strange assertions to prove space ships, but the probability in it being mundane is much higher.
You are hardly in a position to decide what is and is not probable, and you won't be until you do some more reading.
The cutting edge military aviation technology we have in the air today is ancient stuff. UAVs didn't just spring up from nowhere, nor did stealth technology...the shit was being developed back in the 60s. Do you really believe we just had a sudden epiphany with this kind of technology and managed to produce it overnight?
You're telling me information which I already know. --You even took the time to spell out the words from which the acronym "UFO" is constructed in your last post. Do you really believe you are the first to think these thoughts? I'm a UFO theorist, for goodness sake! Why on earth would you assume I've not considered these things? Just how foolish have the other UFO guys you've talked to been?
Anyway, as per your point. . , you seem to think that UFO's can be explained by experimental jets. --While I agree that this is probably true in some cases, after one examines the evidence available, suggesting that experimental jets are to blame for the whole show is virtually unthinkable. Consider: sightings of highly maneuverable UFO's date back to the 1940's. This was several years before the first successful nuclear bomb test. Do you really think that experimental jets capable of speeds of thousands of miles per hour and turn-on-a-dime maneuvering was really within the scope of human technology in the 1940's?
There were numerous sightings over much of Europe. Radar accounts also recorded these sightings, so they weren't just figments. Interestingly, it was later learned that each country's government was spooked by the sightings and thought enough of them to take the matter very seriously, thinking that their neighbors were secretly developing high-tech aircraft, not knowing that their neighboring countries in fact all thought the same thing in return about their next door neighbors. As it happens, nobody had ships of those sizes which could move at those kinds of speeds or maneuver in the ways described. It was a mystery, and it didn't go away.
Perhaps you are basing your views on UFO books and similar which were published before the Freedom of Information Act. I don't know. This stuff seems abundant and compelling to me, and the kinds of people who have come forward to tell their stories from within the air force are very hard to deny. The history is all out there, and anybody who looks at it would be amazed. You obviously haven't looked.
I think I've said everything which can be said to you at this point, so unless you have something of value to add other than dumb tin-foil hat jokes and more of your butchered English and school-yard logic, please don't bother responding.
-FL
You really are a special kind of crazy. So...I will go ahead and clarify something. UFO - Unidentified Flying Object - EXTREMELY COMMON! Space ships - What the hell ever crazy guy. Yes, there are tons of UFOs sighted, documented, and whatnot. Most are nothing significant. As for your photo nonsense...Photoshop to the rescue! Police, pilots, military officers, and ATC guys may not "play silly hoaxes" but they certainly have a LONG and respected tradition of making monumental mistakes.
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When you use the term 'crazy', what you really appear to be saying is that I answered your questions within the bounds of logic. This illustrated how your pre-determined belief is based on faulty thinking which in turn sent you into spasms of outrage and sloppy thinking. (Your opening paragraph is a real winner. Sounds like you're shooting spittle while typing.)
Let's go through point by point. .
Yes, there are tons of UFOs sighted, documented, and whatnot. Most are nothing significant.
What exactly you are basing your contention that "most are nothing significant" on? What are you referencing? I'm guessing nothing but thin air.
As for your photo nonsense...Photoshop to the rescue!
Huh? You need to go back and read my original response to you regarding photographs, (that is, I said that it was very hard to take a decent photograph of a UFO, which is why there are so few in evidence) and then come back and explain to me how you are making any sense whatsoever by blurting, "Photoshop to the rescue!". Do you think that you have succeeded in answering my point? --You are calling me crazy based on my ideas, but you don't appear to be able to string together fundamental thought components.
Police, pilots, military officers, and ATC guys may not "play silly hoaxes" but they certainly have a LONG and respected tradition of making monumental mistakes.
This is true. But if those instances were the norm, we'd have more planes crashing than landing, which we don't. What we do have are over 400 officially documented multiple-witness accounts (recorded from between 1941-1973). When faced with that, one is forced to question just how much monumental human error can be relied upon to explain the events in question. --And we're talking about machine-recorded events, too. Radar systems log this stuff. Honestly, without having read these events, you simply cannot judge, and when you try to cast it all away as human error, you sound ridiculous to anybody who has bothered to look at the evidence within context.
Oh...and method of travel claimed by the aliens themselves?! How the fuck do the aliens claim anything when their existence is FAR from proven and you go on to argue that abductions are likely lies.
Again, there is far more information available than you are clearly aware of. Instead of cursing and assuming, try asking. --I did not say that abduction stories are likely lies. That is yet more illogical assumption on your part. --A subject cannot lie under hypnosis, but the subconscious can certainly become tangled, and there are very likely parties whom such confusion serves. In any case, the communications I am referring to do not come via abduction victims per se, but rather via channeled material, --another subject which I suspect you know virtually nothing about but which you will nonetheless spit and spasm over rather than take the time to investigate, so it's hardly worth mentioning. All I can say is that many people who have a far firmer grasp upon reason, (as well as grammar and social grace) than you do have accepted that such material is well worth considering. Perhaps you should take the cue.
As far as test flights being ordered to buzz things...you have CLEARLY never EVER met a fighter pilot...let alone a fighter pilot selected for the uber secret top of the field test pilot designation. You will be hard pressed to find a fighter pilot that HASN'T done something monumentally stupid they were told not to
1. The small LCD screen. --I find it very hard to write on something where I cannot see the whole paragraph I'm working on. And. . .
2. Their outrageous prices. $600 for a keyboard and a very small LCD screen? What's that? Like $10 in parts? --It was obviously a greed-inspired ploy to sell lots of units to schools on government contracts. This seemed criminal enough that I swore I'd never buy one of their products until their pricing dropped to non-criminal levels. The funny thing is that they panicked with these new small notebooks coming out, like the OLPC, and dropped their prices so that they're only making a 2000% profit, but even in so doing, they are not a company with even a shred of actual altruism.
The only two things Alphasmart has going for it are battery life and a big keyboard. But their business practice still makes me want to drop them like a warm bag of shit, and I sincerely hope their business goes belly up. Also, I picked up a used HP Jonada810 for my portable word processing, and it does a great job. The 4 hour battery life on that thing suits me just fine, since I'm rarely away from a power outlet for that long.
So, depending on the keyboard qualities, I'll either be picking up one of ASUS' machines or an OLPC. --And I don't think I'd mind taking a small tech disadvantage (if there is one), so that I can make sure that when I buy a machine, a kid somewhere can benefit from a free laptop. Connecting the world is a great idea!
-FL
"required to keep records" means about squat. So you are going to tell me that people required to keep records makes it legit? What about the people required to keep records of the cooling systems of the nuclear subs that all just got fired recently for pencil whipping all the reports.
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Of course all systems are open to human fault, but given the systems we have available, the requirement for say, an air traffic controller to record a weird event, in combination with a pilots' experience of the same event, in combination with a police officer on the ground writing down his experience of the same event leaves a documented pattern which can be referenced later with much greater clarity than that of a couple of regular people walking home at night who saw something but who wrote nothing down at all. So no, I must completely disagree with you. Records in these instances do not mean "squat" just because some submarine maintenance people pretended to record numbers on a cooling system they were too lazy to go and actually look at. Jeez. That'd be like a cop pretending to see a UFO and then writing it down in his official daily report. How much sense does that make?
Second...lets do some basic rational thought about the Area 51 business.
Nobody's arguing about the existence of experimental jets. But if you want to ask basic rational questions, then you need to first know the data, which you clearly do not, (and which is why I recommend people read up on this stuff before spouting off.) --That is, sightings began in earnest in 1941 by the hundreds with the introduction of radar and heavy military air traffic. --It is assumed, and indeed there is evidence of activity prior to this, but 1941 is were the military and secret services began to take interest. This happened over all developed nations. So assuming, as you appear to be saying, that the sightings are the result of test flights of experimental jets, then it would be required that we were developing technology far, far beyond that which we had available to us in the 1940's. --The behavior of the sightings, I should add, remains consistent between then and now; the UFO's haven't gotten faster or more maneuverable as the decades have passed.
Secondly. . . Why on earth would test flights from a place like Area 51, for instance, be ordered to buzz commercial and military flights, sometimes even leading to their destruction? You have to stretch fairly far in order for that to make sense.
That having been said...lets examine aliens.
Ah. More of your 'rational thought', eh? Well, let's see what you offer up. .
So...a group that has managed Interstellar travel and avoidance of all the thousands of eyes we have in the sky from hobbyist astronomers are sneaking past, ACCIDENTALLY getting caught flying low over populated areas, and in some accounts performing abductions and odd medical things that are rather primitive even by our standards? Explain to me exactly where ANY of that makes an ounce of sense?
It's really not that complicated.
First of all, you said it yourself; "possibly Inter-dimensional travel". This is actually the purported mode claimed by the aliens themselves, and it would certainly explain why many UFO's are capable of blinking into and out of existence and performing various maneuvers which appear impossible by our standards of navigation; when time is a vector, then our experience of an object poking through from another layer of reality would be peculiar indeed. --Though, there is also certainly evidence of objects appearing and remaining as objects in our layer of reality, both on earth and out in the solar system. How many moons does Jupiter have now? --I am not saying that every new moon is a hidden space platform, but it does offer a valid counterpoint to your question. I should also mention that there are a number of objects in very close orbit around the Sun which have been noticed, as well as objects which orbit the Sun in the Earth's wake. --Ju
I wish that were the case. The public has fallen many times for scams which are just as incredibly dumb. (Diebold, anybody? WMD's? Peek oil? Heck, the entire FOX News structure. The list is endless.) FEMA had every reason to believe that they'd get away with it. I know guys who work in journalism, and the bullshit which doesn't get called out is hair raising.
Give Endgame a watch and see what you think. --The first third of the film is a bit juvenile, but once you get past that, it starts to offer up some fascinating points. (I didn't know that Bill Gates was a eugenics proponent. Ick.)
-FL
This film seemed kinda juvenile for the first third, but then got progressively more informative.
I still think Alex Jones is leaving out huge tracts of vital information, namely the alien element, which makes me wonder if he's not part of the agenda on some level, though the data he's presenting is still certainly useful to recognize. Another thought is that perhaps Jones is deliberately avoiding certain areas because he knows most people automatically shut down when discussion ventures too far from 'normal', and he's aware that he's already pushing most people's boundaries as it is with this relatively simple stuff. Michael Moore is similar in this regard. I know one or two documentarians, and they struggle with this stuff; where do you create your boundaries? You can't deal with everything even though you want to. In any case, the things people fear most to talk about openly are those which are most important in the big picture.
For those who can't deal with the whole alien thing, I generally offer up Richard Dolan's work, which provides the first step by simply establishing the existence of UFO's through excruciating evidence provided in over 400 multiple-witness accounts of UFO's as reported by military officers, police and pilots, (no civilians), --all people who are required to make official records of their encounters. After that, there are more curious elements at work which can be examined, but most people will simply never be able to break through their programming to deal even with the most basic layers of this information. People are too frightened of getting laughed at. Sad, really, that people will avoid looking for such silly reasons, but it happens all the time.
Funny old world, we live in.
-FL
Oh please. Naomi Wolf didn't cut the video together herself. I know plenty of people all over the political spectrum who make typos, and far worse, so that's an exceptionally lame excuse for not wanting to listen to a lecture. If you don't like the material being discussed, why not just say so rather than find excuses to avoid listening? --Or maybe, (horrors), offer up your own 'reasoned argument' for why you think the material is at fault. --I've written many hundreds of such arguments in my time, so I figured it couldn't hurt to hear it from another person's perspective. --I thought she did a pretty succinct job, although a little more confidence at the end of her speech might have been appropriate.
-FL
BBC? Wrong country, eh?
And no, I've been watching Michael Moore, (Sicko) which I would recommend to anybody. And my question about Bush leaving is, I hope very much, rhetorical, because the other possibility means shooting and prison camps for those who wouldn't like the idea of him staying on. But thanks so much for your input.
-FL
FOX taking it on the chin(part 1) and part 2 and
Any thoughts on Ron Paul? He's against national health care, but I can almost let that go as it sounds like normal dyed in the wool Republican logic. If you could somehow combine Ron Paul and Clinton into a single candidate. . . Aw hell, is it even possible to have an actual vote anymore? Is Bush even planning to leave office in 2008?
Sheesh. You Americans have me all worked up with your politics. I have work to do, damn it!
-FL
Drugs are for those who want to avoid reality.
-FL
That's it. They'll put up with enormous shit otherwise. So if you keep up the flow of cheeseburgers and TV, the dictators will rule forever. --Or until such a time as the rest of the world decides to invade or the whole system is so totally sucked dry that it collapses with a dry wheeze like Russia did at the end of the cold war. Yep, it's a grim situation. But it gets worse. . .
I'm not convinced that this is all about just simple control. Has anybody noticed there seem to be a lot more rocks falling out of the sky recently? I sure have. There's bigger stuff at stake here. All those miles of barbed wire enclosures don't get built for nothing. The next ten months are going to be interesting, to say the least. I hope for one of two things; that people wake the hell up and throw Bush and Cheney and crew in prison forever and reinstate a real government, or that we have a really, really good TV season in 2008 and that McDonnald's has a two for one special, because it's not just FEMA, --this Blackwater thing operating on American soil is totally freaky.
Excellent Youtube video [youtube.com] dealing with this stuff. . .
-FL
--My moment of epiphany was when I saw a documentary interest piece which covered a Japanese punk rock convention. Some convention organizer had painted a white line on the ground, and there was this long row of about two hundred guys and girls all dressed up in fab punk-gear with spikes and pink mohawks and such, all of them standing shoulder to shoulder with their toes neatly and orderly at the line --all of them fiercely bobbing their heads to The Clash or whoever.
It made my heart break so see such deeply programmed respect for the invisible whip of social control. People are heavily, heavily programmed over here as well, but the level of emotional repression and fear of authority is nowhere nearly as nuts.
-FL
Grrr, yourself. We all descended from somewhere and it's fine to take pride in your roots. But Cape Breton is a world unto itself, and anybody who argues that doesn't know any Cape Bretoners. Pointing out its characteristics is not a comment on the quality of the people. It's simply a recognition of the culture as the people living it have chosen to manifest. And it's not the people living in Cape Breton who are calling the shots on building a space port. It's the federal government.
-FL
What? And ruin Randi's career? The guy's a stage performer with a huge ego on the line. He can't afford to lose this bet, and so he won't. Reading through some of the lengths he goes to in order to avoid fair testing is entertaining. One of my favorites was a very rude letter he wrote to one fellow accusing him of lying without even agreeing to look at the evidence offered or do any preliminary testing. That's hardly scientific.
Yeah, there are lots of scam artists and willfully deluded people out there, and his little challenge was an interesting way to expose them. Kudos. But seriously; anybody with half a brain knows the game is still rigged. Randi functions from the assumption that it's all smoke and mirrors. His model and his mind can't handle the real thing, and so it never will.
-FL
Those who cleave to a materialistic view of the universe tend to experience a universe where it's just creaking floor boards and easily fooled people who reinforce the belief that the guy who watches the Discovery Channel is the smartest ego in the room. --The multiple balls of light which enter through windows and buzz the household, and the collective blackout experiences which leave the family stunned and all the clocks running backwards, and the dozens of piles of shit appearing from nowhere all over the house shortly before it bursts into flames and burns to the ground. . . Such events seem to happen only to those who have chosen to allow such things to exist in their world views.
I've dealt with a load of events which don't fit into the orthodox view of reality. One of my favorites was the weird-looking spider my girlfriend found in the kitchen which when she coaxed it on to a piece of paper, ran around in alarm, stopped and then dissolved into a small pile of sand. --That and the burning tree which had fallen across the street amidst a tangle of downed power lines, but which vanished with no trace a few minutes later, only to re-appear shortly afterwards, and then vanish again. This is a very weird universe, but yeah, people can avoid experiencing the things which don't fit their belief systems if that's what they choose. Fear often has a lot to do with it. --I've seen on a few occasion orthodox believers experience things which don't fit, and rather than deal with the fall-out, just refuse to think or talk about the events. But that's probably my own belief system exerting itself; smug people being shaken up happens around me from time to time.
-FL
More of those coffin nails, hammered in earlier last century. Cocaine use is also a problem in certain areas. Sigh. Cape Breton has been under attack for a while now.
-FL
Stupid Feds. Put my tax dollars into libraries, bike paths and food inspection agents who are trained to say "No" to hormone laden milk and GMO crops. Thank you.
-FL
I did a bit of scoping about on this fellow and it appears that Ingo Swann has a tendency toward uncritical analysis. This is especially apparent with his fervent regard for the subject of the Virgin Mary, about which he has written extensively. Apparitions of Mary don't really interest me; for the most part I think they fall into three categories; 1. Communications from positive higher beings which use the umbrella imagery of Mary because this is what those people who are calling out want to see and can understand. 2. Misleading apparitions produced by negative forces trying to mislead people, (I'd guess at least half of 'legitimate' sightings are like this), and 3. Apparitions which come about as a result of energies in the area being focused by the viewers themselves. In any case, I find that the whole subject lives rather in the land of Elvis on black velvet and it just doesn't interest me a whole lot. The positive sightings are meant for people who function in very different ways than I do. For my part, there are far more useful ways to spend my time and energy than chasing after visions bearing little significance and which serve to cement people in Christian cultism. Maybe it's useful for some people, but it's certainly not my path.
As for Swann. . . His interpreting appearances of Mary as being warnings about the threat of Communism, seems really flaky and politically self-serving, and those are the kinds of alarm bells I listen to. Swann strikes me as being a well-meaning but self-deluding fellow who has mistaken his interesting but likely over-stated psychic abilities to mean far more than they really do. I suspect that he is manipulated on some level, (this happens often when people are prone to wishful thinking and low self-criticism), to spread confusion which in the end keeps people from collecting real knowledge. More harm than good. Flakiness has a certain feel and smell to it which remains fairly constant, and Swann sems rather smelly to me.
This isn't to say that he is not worth reading. He probably does have some useful things to say, and such characters can serve as good exercises in critical thinking, but I don't think I'd bother. There are far more interesting books and sources out there where the bullshit levels ring in much lower.
Those are my thoughts, anyway. Every path is different.
-FL
One day, all the Christians float bodily into the sky, leaving all the unbelievers left to muddle their way around on the Earth's surface, where things fall quickly into chaos. Magic works and some people even turn into vampires and demon-horn people.
The story flows, with people dealing with the sudden possibility that, "God is real and he doesn't love me! I got Left Behind(tm)"
Then at the end, it turns out that this quadrant of the galaxy went through a paradigm shift which altered the laws of physics and allowed the energies of the human race to express themselves directly. --Turns out that there is now a big ring of dead people around the planet. --The Christian belief of 'rising into the heavens' manifested literally and they all died from lack of oxygen and turned into space junk.
This might be closer to the truth than people realize, albeit in a metaphorical sense. But then my own belief system is abnormal by all counts, one aspect of which is that the whole religion scam is designed deliberately to keep people from believing in and using their own innate power.
Who needs a savior? Don't surrender your own growth and power waiting around for somebody else to take care of you. I suspect that was one of Christ's original and uncorrupted messages which got edited out by power-hungery guys in tall hats who needed lots of slave labor for their free meal ticket. --I bet Christ had the mind of a researcher; you can't evolve the spirit if you don't question and explore the limits of your being.
-FL