So. . , is Secustic a business filled with a large number of morally-abled people, or does Tweakers.net simply hold enough clout to swing the public perception balance between, "Lone Hacker Finds Flaw = Sue Him!" and, "Responsible News Agency Discovers Faulty Product = Retract Immediately While Covering Tracks With Slick PR Weasels!"?
I am also curious. . . What does the law in the Netherlands say regarding corporate mandates? Are Dutch corps allowed to put other things ahead of generating profit for shareholders?
Schools could indeed be an extremely useful tool if they worked universally at all levels from a positive set of intentions. --Such intentions might include making available a wide and unbiased range of knowledge and an encouragement of the act of learning itself; An awareness of how the dark side operates so that it can be recognized and chosen against. I'd also like to see the age groups of children mixed. --Bullying, for instance, I think becomes far less pervasive when children are intermixed into age groups of varying levels. Segregating according to age gives kids nobody to look up to for guidance, or to offer leadership to. Removing this creates confusion and unhealthy competition.
I grew up on a street which had a couple dozen kids between the ages of 2 and 17. There were certainly difficulties, but these were the exception. It was amazing to see how well designed humans are when they are intermixed in a natural environment. We learned more together, and cared more about each other than I've ever seen in the alien school-yard and class-room environment. I am fairly convinced that this natural system is disrupted on some level deliberately so that bullying and confusion become the norm in schools. This way, kids stop trusting their peers and instead look to the school/government/corporate system itself for the ultimate guidance. It's just another step in isolating people so that they can be better controlled.
One of the best ways to empower humans is to allow them to network. Networking cannot take place without a reason for them to trust oneanother.
War, in all instances, is the result of nationalistic propaganda and of greed. While I believe that war is not likely going to go away in this level of reality, it does not mean that one isn't allowed to choose against it on a personal level. I know of some people who have gone to great and difficult lengths to avoid serving in military agencies which they feel are performing evil. But they are able to opt out and live their lives according to their choices and to find alternative ways to give to their communities.
I opted out of school because I found its negative qualities offensive and jarring. I think I might have been lucky, because I was operating largely on instinct at the time. I didn't have the breadth of awareness I do today.
So mix some good in with lots of bad, and that makes it okay to mess with children?
The Japanese offered a great example a few months back. ..
TOKYO, Dec. 15 -- Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's government on Friday successfully pushed through landmark laws requiring Japanese schools to encourage patriotism in the classroom and elevating the Defense Agency to the status of a full ministry for the first time since World War II.
Both measures are considered cornerstones of Abe's conservative agenda to bolster Japan's military status and rebuild national pride in a country that had long associated patriotism with its imperialist past. The legislation cleared the upper house of parliament on Friday after winning approval in the lower house last month and will come into effect early next year.
You want to your country to become a military super-power in fifteen years? You do two things; you legislate legal military growth, and you start brain-washing the kids you'll want to recruit.
School may have some cool teachers, and I did mention this, but it is also a powerful tool which is indeed being used to strip kids of their individuality and their ability to think for themselves.
There are better ways to provide people with education than the current system.
The school system, with the exception of a few special teachers, is an exercise in mind-programming. --Specifically, making sure that people grow up with a powerful, nearly hard-wired respect for authority and control systems. Training kids to be good little workers.
I barely survived high school exactly because of crazy authority figures. I was never rude, I was never mean-spirited. I simply came to the realization that school was 95% boring, brain-washing busy-work and stopped attending all but one class which I needed in order to graduate and get my 'piece of paper'. I'd already been accepted into the college of my choice, so the whole graduating process was purely a formality. I figured, "Why waste my time going to a bunch of classes I sleep through anyway?"
Many of the teachers didn't even notice. A few of the cool ones said, "Yeah. That makes sense. Good luck!"
A remaining clutch of staff members, however, perceived my actions as a personal attack of the worst sort and made it a top priority to prevent me from graduating. It had nothing to do with rules and everything to do with what they thought of as disrespectful behavior on my part. They thought I was cheating the system, which I suppose I was. (But then, I figured that the system was cheating everybody, so I wasn't about to feel guilty about not jumping through a bunch of silly hoops.)
I remember teachers saying, "But you'll get failing marks!" And I remember saying, "And. . ? Do you really believe I'm going to let a piece of paper stop me from traveling the world and doing all the things I want to do in life? If an employer is unable to see me for who I am without consulting my high school grades, then why on earth would I want to work for such a person? Whatever job they are offering is probably going to be more of the same stuff they pace kids with in high school anyway. No thanks."
"But you'll only ever be able to work as a cashier. As a burger flipper!"
"No. That's only true if you believe it, which I don't. --I spent last Summer working at a cool company which I found simply by walking in off the street to visit. I expressed keen interest in learning about what they did, and they let me hang around and help out. By the end of the Summer, they'd offered me a high-paying full-time position with lots of growth potential. I turned it down so I could come back here and finish my high school off and get my piece of paper. How foolish was that?" (I'd been conned into believing that the school system and its graduating certificates actually meant something. That programming took some time to undo, by which point I was already in the last third of the last year and pulling my hair out.)
Anyway, they were really upset that somebody would dare point out the flaws in the edifice of the 'unquestionable authority' which the school system was supposed to represent, and which they felt children must yield to, kneel before, fear and be willing to jump through hoops for. Instead, I just looked at it and yawned. This made some of the adults in charge fume with rage and indignation. I still don't fully understand why.
My parents were called, legalities were threatened, they tried to make me sign agreements through physical intimidation. It was all very strange. --I remember around the same time, one fellow in a suit who I'd never seen before, actually chased me down the hall, grabbed me by the arm and blustered in my face, "When you are a professional, you will understand that you cannot criticize another professional!" (Or something to that effect.) --I'd made the mistake of reading and laughing at a posted flyer for a course he was apparently in charge of and which I thought was ridiculous. I laughingly explained why I thought so to a friend, and bluster-man happened to be standing right behind me.
Maybe, deep down, such people know that they have ridiculous, frustratingly broken job descriptions and rather than just deal with it honestly or change things, they instead try to
1. I see a number of people posting, "I played a lot of violent video games and I turned out okay"-style comments.
Hm. I remember when America rolled into Iraq at the outset of the current war effort in the Middle East. I remember people posting as though they all had patriotic erections and typing in thought nuggets which seemed to be framed in Command & Conquer inspired understandings of the event. --A game which, I would hazard to guess, was at the time the prevailing experience of warfare held by most Slashdotters.
With that much programming into the populace of "War = ADDICTIVE FUN!!!", how tough was it really to get the population's approval for such a war? The Rah-Rah support factor among the population was just plain embarrassing before things inevitably turned sour, at which point it was too late.
Also. . , how many troops currently hefting firearms over there were not first weaned on point & shoot games? There's a reason America's Army was created and given away for free. The hugely popular, culture-spanning video games when I was a kid included stuff like Space Invaders, Asteroids, Pac Man, Donkey Kong and Defender. Summer Games and Galaga were also big. --A solid portion of these involved no guns, the other half involved shooting rocks or shooting aliens in defense of the planet. Nobody was shooting at other people.
Video games have undergone a very interesting shift, and I don't remember exactly when it happened. It was subtle and creepy, and it has lulled the populace into an entirely different head-space. Think: if GTA3 were released in the Pac Man days, there would have been protest bonfires in the streets. Don't kid yourself. It would not have been allowed or accepted. It takes careful planning and long-term work to re-program an entire populace into something sufficiently dark and psychopathic enough to sustain an evil empire, illegal wars and torture camps. If the Bush regime had tried to pull their crap twenty years ago, there is a much greater chance that they would have been put in prison.
When you train up your population to think of death-dealing as a fun and painless form of entertainment, it's quite a lot easier to start and maintain those highly profitable wars.
Point 2. . .
Physical play is how kids train their brains and bodies to function in the real world. If you take all those thousands of hours of childhood and instead plug them into a virtual reality where they can satisfy that part of their developing brain which is driving them to learn through play, you by-pass all the physical training and thereby create a race of single hit-point slug people.
Me and the friends I grew up with had the advantage of being on the bleeding edge of computers, which meant that video games and home computers were novelties, not the norm. Any self-respecting person of my age knows how to climb a tree and jump a dirt-bike better than most of today's crop of children.
My guess is that those humans surviving in this reality will be huddling in caves while the cold wind blows over the icy, blasted remains of our current ridiculous population.
I can't decide if this would be good, bad, or somewhere in between. It would essentially be creating a Heaven for yourself. Your body could physically reside in the worst hellhole on earth, you could be crippled or handicapped beyond repair, yet you'd be able to live the lifestyle of a god. Might be nice.
I always thought 'The Matrix' didn't need the McGuffin of robots enslaving humanity through force. I figured there'd be plenty of people who would be happy enough to build the darned cage on their own and that the robots would only be servants filling the feed-tubes and maintaining things. --And stopping the boat rockers who wanted to wake up and disrupt the status quo. --While the real overlords would be the life forms who benefit from suckering humans into such a pitiful state of affairs and who feed from their easily manipulable 'chi' energies which most humans remain unaware they even possess.
But I think that might be a little too close to reality as it currently stands.
The gun Daddy carries is real, and there are huge consequenses attached to its use. By letting them see me behaving this way, I think they will learn and retain this lesson easily. Responsibility can be taught by example.
Is Daddy a law enforcement official, a soldier, a gangsta or what?
My SO's father is a teacher. He's one of the good ones; praised by everybody in town, kids and adults alike. He tells me that in his estimation on average, children today as compared to kids from when he started teaching, are far less able to handle the intellectual/emotional demands of school and life in general.
My guess is that we can blame video games, TV, and electronic brain-mushing devices of all sorts.
Kids are designed to interact directly with the world in order that their growing brains can absorb as much useful data as possible. Childhood grants a lot of time to assimilate all of this experiential information, and the drive to collect this experience is built into children as the desire to play.
Now, if you replace the real world with a candy-coated sensory alternative, (aka, a virtual reality 'pod'), then all those thousands of hours the child would normally spend interacting with the world are not just wasted, but actually serve to create bad programming which limits them for the rest of their lives.
The fact that Apple knew enough to so aptly name their creepy little device suggests that they also should know better.
I believe they mean ONE iPod for every kid in Michigan. Though, I can't imagine how useful that would be for such a large population base. Though it does sound like one of the more expensive models. Maybe it has lots of headphone jacks.
The RIAA and MPAA are obviously psychotic. (The basic premise of the film is that corporations, which are considered 'people' under the law, are psychotic in nature. Real people have moral boundaries and consciences. Corporations, by comparison, don't have these handy little programs running in the background.)
My question is that if corporations are considered people under law, then shouldn't they also be subject to the same kinds of provisions set aside for the criminally insane?
--That is, shouldn't they have their citizen's rights limited so that they cannot do harm?
f you quit playing video games, why are you trolling articles in the Game catagory?
Because psychology interests me. And so do games to some degree. --I'm looking forward to knowing how the story-line for the Command & Conquer series unfolds, for instance.
Also, your logic is faulty, to some extent. While I can understand your viewpoint, there is also the question of why you wanted to play video games in the first place, and what prompted you to quit. If you experienced a life-changing decision that removed your desire to play video games (assuming you were actually a gamer, and not just someone who played a video game every now and then), isn't it more likely that this life-altering moment has more to do with your peace of mind than what entertainment you take part in?
Hm. Well, you probably have a point there.
The reason I wanted to play video games in the first place was the "Wow" factor. I grew up as home computers also grew up. I was around 10 years old when the Apple II first came out. I wanted to experience everything which had to do with computers. It wasn't until much later that the social patterns began to emerge. We've come a long way since Pac Man! --I also stopped wanting to play video games when I realized that the games available in the game store ceased to interest me. If it didn't have a compelling story, then I didn't care. The more violent and 'mean' the games became, the more they repelled me. If they didn't repel me, then I would have had to embrace the head-space of such games to a degree. And I definitely had the choice. I chose to embrace more positive energies. I decided that I didn't want to be the kind of person who got excited about getting a, "Head Shot," in Unreal Tournament.
I was playing thousands of hours worth of video games well into my late twenties, but eventually I decided that I wanted to put my energy and attention into things which could show a return on investment, so to speak. Stopping took a powerful act of will, and it was cold turkey. It failed several times before I got it right. --And to be honest, it wasn't even will power so much as I started to get violently ill, (vomiting), if I played a game for more than an hour or so. When your body is telling you to quit, it's a good idea to listen.
But it was all part and parcel with my decision to grow my awareness and light and to walk away from many of the control measures placed upon people. Soul-work is important stuff, and it's why we came here. Video games are useful to a degree insofar as they are a part of this reality for us to explore, but they can easily evolve into a distraction from more powerful lessons.
You're not only deliberately stripping away your humanity, you're proud of it. That scares and saddens me.
Humanity is anger and an internal desire to express violent thoughts? Hm. Interesting definition. Are you sure you've not been lied to?
I very much doubt that humanity can be stripped away by avoiding TV and video games, or by focusing on positive experiences. I might venture to say that the opposite is true. But I'd be wrong. Humanity is that which is human; we all get to define it as we go.
So I'll tell you what; You express and explore your humanity the way you see fit, and I'll be over here doing it my way. Waaaay over here. Out of range.
Water seeks its own level. What kind of water are you?
I have played games like this for years and haven't gone postal yet despite having some VERY good reasons in the last few years to be up on a building with a rifle and a scope.
I find this really interesting! --I also had such frustrations in my life and entertained violent thoughts in reaction to them. Then a few years back, I stopped playing video games and I stopped watching TV.
Amazingly, life has become much happier and I now never have any call to be frustrated with life to the point you describe.
I really believe these days that your focus really does determine your reality.
My regime would actually have no qualms about executing such people. We'd just tell them they were going on a fun ride.
You're either trolling, or those video games have affected you more than you realize.
You don't have to act on feelings of hate in order for it to alter the quality of your life and awareness.
Ever since I shifted my own focus a few years back, my life has done nothing but grow brighter and happier; it is filled with loving and compassionate people. The world is an increasingly difficult place, but somehow I am surfing between the rocks.
If you feed the little monster, the little monster grows.
My own 'little monster' gets smaller all the time, because I don't want any monster inside me at all. That's the description of the life mission I follow. --To hunt down all darkness and annihilate it within the self. If I can walk into a room and interact with anybody, shine brightly, comfortably and with grace so that every person I touch also finds a way to glow, then I am approaching the best version of myself. If I have a little monster whispering anger to me, then this mission in my life is hampered. The more time and energy I feed to the little monster, the more powerful and comfortable it becomes in its position in my psyche.
Put another way. . . The brain trains itself to fire synapses efficiently. If you spend a lot of time accessing certain types of thought and behavior, the brain re-wires itself to accommodate the firing of those synapses, which in turn makes it easier and faster for the brain to access such thoughts and behaviors. It makes such patterns easy and comfortable. If, however, you retrain your brain in different directions, then the brain rewires itself accordingly. The structure of the brain is always in motion; this is how we grow and learn.
In a very real sense, your focus determines your reality.
As well. . , I also subscribe to the belief that what you focus on becomes real in a far more literal sense. If you focus on negative energies, on mass destruction and painless murders, then these forces will find their way into your life in some manner. How many troops in Iraq were weaned on Quake?
This is not about judgment or guilt. About calling some people, "Sick". It's about what sort of reality you want to live in, what sort of energies you want to attract. I am now able to spend most of my life quite happily. I face my challenges largely without anger, without secretly wanting to harm anybody. This is a fairly significant change from only a few years ago. I find the people around me nowadays are very positive and compassionate. Is this a direct result of my stopping watching TV and playing video games? Perhaps. In any case, I certainly believe that it is all inter-related.
I remember when I used to have a much bigger little monster than I do today.
Because you're not actually asking. You're commanding. --And that's ego speaking; an attempt to control, and that's a barrier to learning. Knowledge isn't about control. Attempting to control the shape and source of knowledge is limiting. Knowledge deforms so that it becomes corrupted when you try to stuff it into a shape which suits the ego.
If you're genuinely interested in more than proving that you are right and that I am wrong, you can show your intent by doing some looking around and by bringing back what you've found; not to prove things one way or another, but simply to find out what the current state of awareness is on the subject of. . . What are we talking about. (It's been a week or so.) Comets? Dark Star stuff? It's an absolutely fascinating field.
Knowledge structures are best built through co-operation, not competition. I'm not asking you to prove my argument for me because I'm not arguing.
I am, however, somewhat lazy. Digging up a bunch of old links and documents from my various files, and weaving them together in an essay to illustrate a series of points takes work, and I find I am increasingly unmotivated to do such work in order to seek reward in that feeling of 'victory' one gets from 'winning' an argument. Blah. That's a dark kind of energy, and I don't like how it affects me. Pulling people up from fortified positions against their will takes effort I can easily invest elsewhere.
If you are curious, then go look. It's all easily available to the resourceful seeker. And what better motivation is there than expanding one's knowledge? And if you manage to ask politely and with honest intent, I would be more motivated in sharing what I've found.
Except this time, the winner actually has the superior product.
Though, I did like the basic concept of the social-network idea. A roaming internet? Cool. Too bad the DRM limitations were so. . , limiting.
And actually, I'm very happy that there's not yet another layer of WiFi devices radiating my environment. At least now the iPod people are just sitting there in their harmless pods. Waiting to sprout. . . (Ugh.)
So the iPod wins. And the more Pod-People there are, the easier it will be to take over the planet. We all lose.
Cuz, it doesn't matter which side you choose. It's all Good Cop, Bad Cop. (MS = Bad Cop/Republican, Apple = Good Cop/Democrat.)
Both are evil and bent on the destruction of the planet.
Every time I see a set of white wires sprouting from somebody's head, I always think back to Star Trek DS9 and that drug the Dominion used to control their grunts. . .
Show me the credible research that proves that we have an undetected binary companion on the fringes of our solar system, or that many of the small moons of the gas giants really were recently captured into stable orbits, or perhaps some documents or statistical data that proves there is a worldwide conspiracy to cover it all up. As far as I can see, you don't HAVE anything credible to prove your point -- you make very broad inferences from some weak hypotheses, and because you WANT it to be true, you believe it HAS to be true.
Tutt tutt! You are making assumptions, and you chose to be rude based on those assumptions rather than ask questions.
If you want to see the information you're requesting, ask nicely. And while you're at it, invest in your own curiosity and look around. (Asking and seeking are linked.) But if you are not interested then you may certainly continue to indulge in rudeness and bland witicisms. You'll get back exactly what you put forth.
It was NOT a meteor. It was NOT a meteor! Repeat: It was NOT a meteor.
Do not consider the idea that it might have been a rock from space, because it was NOT a meteor.
It was space junk. It was perfectly normal. It was NOT a meteor. NOT a METEOR.
Space junk is not a meteor, so this particular fire-ball was clearly NOT a meteor.
I repeat, it-was-NOT-a-meteor!
Are you listening? It was NOT a meteor!!!
The Earth is NOT entering a planet decimating cloud of asteroid debris knocked into a lower orbit from the Kuiper Belt by the unignited twin sun which accounts for the weird wobble in all the solar orbits. Do not panic. Keep on buying things. Ignore the severe population control measures being put into place under the guise of fighting terrorism. Or consider. . .
All the new moons observed around our gas giants; The new moon population jumped from single digits to 50 - 80 new moons per gas giant. Many explain this by pointing to our increasingly powerful telescopes. The only problem. . . The new moons were discovered around the furthest to nearest planets in descending order through time, starting with Neptune. Could it be big rocks being caught up by the big gravity sources as the comet cluster heads Sun-ward? Hmm. The Shoemaker-Levy asteroid hit Jupiter in 1994; the most recent evidence from the incoming debris. It is estimated that it can take about 9 years for the bulk of the comet cluster to reach Earth. Which leaves us with just enough time for one more messed up election.
Right, first you accuse the parent of being too human centric and then you go and spill your heart out about how suffering and negative emotions are something more than just mechanisms that help humans interact with their environment.
Negative emotions are certainly tied to behavioral mechanisms, but they nonetheless have an energetic quality. This is not human-centric. It's life-centric. Since aliens are also alive, it's a common denominator which we share with them. Our technology and perceived limits of physical reality are not. The original poster was making a false assumption with regard to this.
And then you go on to complain about how media and schools have an aversion to science while posting gibberish which flies in the face of every even slightly credible scientific worldview.
You only think I'm talking gibberish because you happen to be ignorant. Your concept of a 'credible scientific worldview' is limited by the media you watch and the education you received. Circular logic, I know, however it also happens to be correct.
I could go an and refute every single one of your points in detail, but I bet you are not in it for discussion, judging by your casual dismissal of Carl Sagan.
You could try, but seeing as you still believe in the orthodox explanation of reality, it means you probably don't know how to challenge conventional thinking and thus have little in the arsenal of your mind beyond the regular canned nonsense most sleepers come pre-installed with. For instance. . . Carl Sagan is an astrophysicist. Why do you believe this gives him any authority in the matter of UFOs? What does stellar chemistry and gravity modeling have to do with understanding alien intent?
Anyone advanced enough to develop interstellar travel would probably be smart enough to come up with better plans than our politicians; if anything the Earth would be much better regulated than it is now. Then again they would also probably be smart enough not to bother ruling a backward planet filled with suicidal primates bent on taking the world with them.
You are thinking too human-centric.
Consider the following possibility. . .
Aliens exist in a higher state of reality than we can perceive; that is, they are with us right now, all the time. They function and exist in a state where time does not exist for them in the same way it does for us. That is, the thousands of UFO reports are not of nuts and bolts technology, but of bits of reality poking through into ours.
Second. . . What if these aliens are to us what we are to cows. That they are here to eat us. What if they consume the energy from negative emotions such as fear and pain. This would explain our high population, our constant state of screwed up religion, war and general suffering around the globe. It also explains our media's and our education system's aversion of looking at sciences which would help explain the alien presence. That of being living on the "spirit plane", (so to speak). Of chi and magic in general.
This explanation, as distasteful as it sounds, nonetheless answers all the puzzles presented to us be the short-sighted Carl Sagans of the world. Sci-fi wants us to think in terms of other humans from space. It doesn't look at the idea that aliens are far more intelligent and have no interest in communicating with us beyond manipulation and control.
Look at our cattle industry. --We breed an entire race of animals totally controlled for our consumption. Aliens need to eat too.
Slashdot Mirror
I am also curious. . . What does the law in the Netherlands say regarding corporate mandates? Are Dutch corps allowed to put other things ahead of generating profit for shareholders?
-FL
Schools could indeed be an extremely useful tool if they worked universally at all levels from a positive set of intentions. --Such intentions might include making available a wide and unbiased range of knowledge and an encouragement of the act of learning itself; An awareness of how the dark side operates so that it can be recognized and chosen against. I'd also like to see the age groups of children mixed. --Bullying, for instance, I think becomes far less pervasive when children are intermixed into age groups of varying levels. Segregating according to age gives kids nobody to look up to for guidance, or to offer leadership to. Removing this creates confusion and unhealthy competition.
I grew up on a street which had a couple dozen kids between the ages of 2 and 17. There were certainly difficulties, but these were the exception. It was amazing to see how well designed humans are when they are intermixed in a natural environment. We learned more together, and cared more about each other than I've ever seen in the alien school-yard and class-room environment. I am fairly convinced that this natural system is disrupted on some level deliberately so that bullying and confusion become the norm in schools. This way, kids stop trusting their peers and instead look to the school/government/corporate system itself for the ultimate guidance. It's just another step in isolating people so that they can be better controlled.
One of the best ways to empower humans is to allow them to network. Networking cannot take place without a reason for them to trust oneanother.
War, in all instances, is the result of nationalistic propaganda and of greed. While I believe that war is not likely going to go away in this level of reality, it does not mean that one isn't allowed to choose against it on a personal level. I know of some people who have gone to great and difficult lengths to avoid serving in military agencies which they feel are performing evil. But they are able to opt out and live their lives according to their choices and to find alternative ways to give to their communities.
I opted out of school because I found its negative qualities offensive and jarring. I think I might have been lucky, because I was operating largely on instinct at the time. I didn't have the breadth of awareness I do today.
-FL
There's time-tables to keep on this whole genocide thing, after all.
As he speeds up the clock with regard to bombing Iran or whatever else needs doing, I suspect the whole email thing will evaporate.
My (not very) optimistic side, however, is thinking that something more interesting might be about to happen. Probably not anything good, mind you.
-FL
Right-on! But impeachment isn't good enough. We need the entire government tipped out and all the rotten ones tossed into the recycling bin.
-FL
The Japanese offered a great example a few months back. .
You want to your country to become a military super-power in fifteen years? You do two things; you legislate legal military growth, and you start brain-washing the kids you'll want to recruit.
School may have some cool teachers, and I did mention this, but it is also a powerful tool which is indeed being used to strip kids of their individuality and their ability to think for themselves.
There are better ways to provide people with education than the current system.
-FL
The school system, with the exception of a few special teachers, is an exercise in mind-programming. --Specifically, making sure that people grow up with a powerful, nearly hard-wired respect for authority and control systems. Training kids to be good little workers.
I barely survived high school exactly because of crazy authority figures. I was never rude, I was never mean-spirited. I simply came to the realization that school was 95% boring, brain-washing busy-work and stopped attending all but one class which I needed in order to graduate and get my 'piece of paper'. I'd already been accepted into the college of my choice, so the whole graduating process was purely a formality. I figured, "Why waste my time going to a bunch of classes I sleep through anyway?"
Many of the teachers didn't even notice. A few of the cool ones said, "Yeah. That makes sense. Good luck!"
A remaining clutch of staff members, however, perceived my actions as a personal attack of the worst sort and made it a top priority to prevent me from graduating. It had nothing to do with rules and everything to do with what they thought of as disrespectful behavior on my part. They thought I was cheating the system, which I suppose I was. (But then, I figured that the system was cheating everybody, so I wasn't about to feel guilty about not jumping through a bunch of silly hoops.)
I remember teachers saying, "But you'll get failing marks!" And I remember saying, "And. . ? Do you really believe I'm going to let a piece of paper stop me from traveling the world and doing all the things I want to do in life? If an employer is unable to see me for who I am without consulting my high school grades, then why on earth would I want to work for such a person? Whatever job they are offering is probably going to be more of the same stuff they pace kids with in high school anyway. No thanks."
"But you'll only ever be able to work as a cashier. As a burger flipper!"
"No. That's only true if you believe it, which I don't. --I spent last Summer working at a cool company which I found simply by walking in off the street to visit. I expressed keen interest in learning about what they did, and they let me hang around and help out. By the end of the Summer, they'd offered me a high-paying full-time position with lots of growth potential. I turned it down so I could come back here and finish my high school off and get my piece of paper. How foolish was that?" (I'd been conned into believing that the school system and its graduating certificates actually meant something. That programming took some time to undo, by which point I was already in the last third of the last year and pulling my hair out.)
Anyway, they were really upset that somebody would dare point out the flaws in the edifice of the 'unquestionable authority' which the school system was supposed to represent, and which they felt children must yield to, kneel before, fear and be willing to jump through hoops for. Instead, I just looked at it and yawned. This made some of the adults in charge fume with rage and indignation. I still don't fully understand why.
My parents were called, legalities were threatened, they tried to make me sign agreements through physical intimidation. It was all very strange. --I remember around the same time, one fellow in a suit who I'd never seen before, actually chased me down the hall, grabbed me by the arm and blustered in my face, "When you are a professional, you will understand that you cannot criticize another professional!" (Or something to that effect.) --I'd made the mistake of reading and laughing at a posted flyer for a course he was apparently in charge of and which I thought was ridiculous. I laughingly explained why I thought so to a friend, and bluster-man happened to be standing right behind me.
Maybe, deep down, such people know that they have ridiculous, frustratingly broken job descriptions and rather than just deal with it honestly or change things, they instead try to
Hm. I remember when America rolled into Iraq at the outset of the current war effort in the Middle East. I remember people posting as though they all had patriotic erections and typing in thought nuggets which seemed to be framed in Command & Conquer inspired understandings of the event. --A game which, I would hazard to guess, was at the time the prevailing experience of warfare held by most Slashdotters.
With that much programming into the populace of "War = ADDICTIVE FUN!!!", how tough was it really to get the population's approval for such a war? The Rah-Rah support factor among the population was just plain embarrassing before things inevitably turned sour, at which point it was too late.
Also. . , how many troops currently hefting firearms over there were not first weaned on point & shoot games? There's a reason America's Army was created and given away for free. The hugely popular, culture-spanning video games when I was a kid included stuff like Space Invaders, Asteroids, Pac Man, Donkey Kong and Defender. Summer Games and Galaga were also big. --A solid portion of these involved no guns, the other half involved shooting rocks or shooting aliens in defense of the planet. Nobody was shooting at other people.
Video games have undergone a very interesting shift, and I don't remember exactly when it happened. It was subtle and creepy, and it has lulled the populace into an entirely different head-space. Think: if GTA3 were released in the Pac Man days, there would have been protest bonfires in the streets. Don't kid yourself. It would not have been allowed or accepted. It takes careful planning and long-term work to re-program an entire populace into something sufficiently dark and psychopathic enough to sustain an evil empire, illegal wars and torture camps. If the Bush regime had tried to pull their crap twenty years ago, there is a much greater chance that they would have been put in prison.
When you train up your population to think of death-dealing as a fun and painless form of entertainment, it's quite a lot easier to start and maintain those highly profitable wars.
Point 2. . .
Physical play is how kids train their brains and bodies to function in the real world. If you take all those thousands of hours of childhood and instead plug them into a virtual reality where they can satisfy that part of their developing brain which is driving them to learn through play, you by-pass all the physical training and thereby create a race of single hit-point slug people.
Me and the friends I grew up with had the advantage of being on the bleeding edge of computers, which meant that video games and home computers were novelties, not the norm. Any self-respecting person of my age knows how to climb a tree and jump a dirt-bike better than most of today's crop of children.
-FL
Flashmobs and Islam?
Seems like wishful thinking to me.
-FL
I always thought 'The Matrix' didn't need the McGuffin of robots enslaving humanity through force. I figured there'd be plenty of people who would be happy enough to build the darned cage on their own and that the robots would only be servants filling the feed-tubes and maintaining things. --And stopping the boat rockers who wanted to wake up and disrupt the status quo. --While the real overlords would be the life forms who benefit from suckering humans into such a pitiful state of affairs and who feed from their easily manipulable 'chi' energies which most humans remain unaware they even possess.
But I think that might be a little too close to reality as it currently stands.
-FL
Is Daddy a law enforcement official, a soldier, a gangsta or what?
-FL
My guess is that we can blame video games, TV, and electronic brain-mushing devices of all sorts.
Kids are designed to interact directly with the world in order that their growing brains can absorb as much useful data as possible. Childhood grants a lot of time to assimilate all of this experiential information, and the drive to collect this experience is built into children as the desire to play.
Now, if you replace the real world with a candy-coated sensory alternative, (aka, a virtual reality 'pod'), then all those thousands of hours the child would normally spend interacting with the world are not just wasted, but actually serve to create bad programming which limits them for the rest of their lives.
The fact that Apple knew enough to so aptly name their creepy little device suggests that they also should know better.
-FL
-FL
The RIAA and MPAA are obviously psychotic. (The basic premise of the film is that corporations, which are considered 'people' under the law, are psychotic in nature. Real people have moral boundaries and consciences. Corporations, by comparison, don't have these handy little programs running in the background.)
My question is that if corporations are considered people under law, then shouldn't they also be subject to the same kinds of provisions set aside for the criminally insane?
--That is, shouldn't they have their citizen's rights limited so that they cannot do harm?
-FL
Because psychology interests me. And so do games to some degree. --I'm looking forward to knowing how the story-line for the Command & Conquer series unfolds, for instance.
Also, your logic is faulty, to some extent. While I can understand your viewpoint, there is also the question of why you wanted to play video games in the first place, and what prompted you to quit. If you experienced a life-changing decision that removed your desire to play video games (assuming you were actually a gamer, and not just someone who played a video game every now and then), isn't it more likely that this life-altering moment has more to do with your peace of mind than what entertainment you take part in?
Hm. Well, you probably have a point there.
The reason I wanted to play video games in the first place was the "Wow" factor. I grew up as home computers also grew up. I was around 10 years old when the Apple II first came out. I wanted to experience everything which had to do with computers. It wasn't until much later that the social patterns began to emerge. We've come a long way since Pac Man! --I also stopped wanting to play video games when I realized that the games available in the game store ceased to interest me. If it didn't have a compelling story, then I didn't care. The more violent and 'mean' the games became, the more they repelled me. If they didn't repel me, then I would have had to embrace the head-space of such games to a degree. And I definitely had the choice. I chose to embrace more positive energies. I decided that I didn't want to be the kind of person who got excited about getting a, "Head Shot," in Unreal Tournament.
I was playing thousands of hours worth of video games well into my late twenties, but eventually I decided that I wanted to put my energy and attention into things which could show a return on investment, so to speak. Stopping took a powerful act of will, and it was cold turkey. It failed several times before I got it right. --And to be honest, it wasn't even will power so much as I started to get violently ill, (vomiting), if I played a game for more than an hour or so. When your body is telling you to quit, it's a good idea to listen.
But it was all part and parcel with my decision to grow my awareness and light and to walk away from many of the control measures placed upon people. Soul-work is important stuff, and it's why we came here. Video games are useful to a degree insofar as they are a part of this reality for us to explore, but they can easily evolve into a distraction from more powerful lessons.
-FL
Humanity is anger and an internal desire to express violent thoughts? Hm. Interesting definition. Are you sure you've not been lied to?
I very much doubt that humanity can be stripped away by avoiding TV and video games, or by focusing on positive experiences. I might venture to say that the opposite is true. But I'd be wrong. Humanity is that which is human; we all get to define it as we go.
So I'll tell you what; You express and explore your humanity the way you see fit, and I'll be over here doing it my way. Waaaay over here. Out of range.
Water seeks its own level. What kind of water are you?
-FL
I find this really interesting! --I also had such frustrations in my life and entertained violent thoughts in reaction to them. Then a few years back, I stopped playing video games and I stopped watching TV.
Amazingly, life has become much happier and I now never have any call to be frustrated with life to the point you describe.
I really believe these days that your focus really does determine your reality.
-FL
You're either trolling, or those video games have affected you more than you realize.
You don't have to act on feelings of hate in order for it to alter the quality of your life and awareness.
Ever since I shifted my own focus a few years back, my life has done nothing but grow brighter and happier; it is filled with loving and compassionate people. The world is an increasingly difficult place, but somehow I am surfing between the rocks.
Your focus determines your reality.
-FL
If you feed the little monster, the little monster grows.
My own 'little monster' gets smaller all the time, because I don't want any monster inside me at all. That's the description of the life mission I follow. --To hunt down all darkness and annihilate it within the self. If I can walk into a room and interact with anybody, shine brightly, comfortably and with grace so that every person I touch also finds a way to glow, then I am approaching the best version of myself. If I have a little monster whispering anger to me, then this mission in my life is hampered. The more time and energy I feed to the little monster, the more powerful and comfortable it becomes in its position in my psyche.
Put another way. . . The brain trains itself to fire synapses efficiently. If you spend a lot of time accessing certain types of thought and behavior, the brain re-wires itself to accommodate the firing of those synapses, which in turn makes it easier and faster for the brain to access such thoughts and behaviors. It makes such patterns easy and comfortable. If, however, you retrain your brain in different directions, then the brain rewires itself accordingly. The structure of the brain is always in motion; this is how we grow and learn.
In a very real sense, your focus determines your reality.
As well. . , I also subscribe to the belief that what you focus on becomes real in a far more literal sense. If you focus on negative energies, on mass destruction and painless murders, then these forces will find their way into your life in some manner. How many troops in Iraq were weaned on Quake?
This is not about judgment or guilt. About calling some people, "Sick". It's about what sort of reality you want to live in, what sort of energies you want to attract. I am now able to spend most of my life quite happily. I face my challenges largely without anger, without secretly wanting to harm anybody. This is a fairly significant change from only a few years ago. I find the people around me nowadays are very positive and compassionate. Is this a direct result of my stopping watching TV and playing video games? Perhaps. In any case, I certainly believe that it is all inter-related.
I remember when I used to have a much bigger little monster than I do today.
Just some thoughts.
-FL
No.
Because you're not actually asking. You're commanding. --And that's ego speaking; an attempt to control, and that's a barrier to learning. Knowledge isn't about control. Attempting to control the shape and source of knowledge is limiting. Knowledge deforms so that it becomes corrupted when you try to stuff it into a shape which suits the ego.
If you're genuinely interested in more than proving that you are right and that I am wrong, you can show your intent by doing some looking around and by bringing back what you've found; not to prove things one way or another, but simply to find out what the current state of awareness is on the subject of. . . What are we talking about. (It's been a week or so.) Comets? Dark Star stuff? It's an absolutely fascinating field.
Knowledge structures are best built through co-operation, not competition. I'm not asking you to prove my argument for me because I'm not arguing.
I am, however, somewhat lazy. Digging up a bunch of old links and documents from my various files, and weaving them together in an essay to illustrate a series of points takes work, and I find I am increasingly unmotivated to do such work in order to seek reward in that feeling of 'victory' one gets from 'winning' an argument. Blah. That's a dark kind of energy, and I don't like how it affects me. Pulling people up from fortified positions against their will takes effort I can easily invest elsewhere.
If you are curious, then go look. It's all easily available to the resourceful seeker. And what better motivation is there than expanding one's knowledge? And if you manage to ask politely and with honest intent, I would be more motivated in sharing what I've found.
-FL
Except this time, the winner actually has the superior product.
Though, I did like the basic concept of the social-network idea. A roaming internet? Cool. Too bad the DRM limitations were so. . , limiting.
And actually, I'm very happy that there's not yet another layer of WiFi devices radiating my environment. At least now the iPod people are just sitting there in their harmless pods. Waiting to sprout. . . (Ugh.)
So the iPod wins. And the more Pod-People there are, the easier it will be to take over the planet. We all lose.
Cuz, it doesn't matter which side you choose. It's all Good Cop, Bad Cop. (MS = Bad Cop/Republican, Apple = Good Cop/Democrat.)
Both are evil and bent on the destruction of the planet.
Every time I see a set of white wires sprouting from somebody's head, I always think back to Star Trek DS9 and that drug the Dominion used to control their grunts. . .
-FL
Tutt tutt! You are making assumptions, and you chose to be rude based on those assumptions rather than ask questions.
If you want to see the information you're requesting, ask nicely. And while you're at it, invest in your own curiosity and look around. (Asking and seeking are linked.) But if you are not interested then you may certainly continue to indulge in rudeness and bland witicisms. You'll get back exactly what you put forth.
-FL
It's called 'research'. And you don't even have to ignite it for it to be effective in countering ignorance.
-FL
Do not consider the idea that it might have been a rock from space, because it was NOT a meteor.
It was space junk. It was perfectly normal. It was NOT a meteor. NOT a METEOR.
Space junk is not a meteor, so this particular fire-ball was clearly NOT a meteor.
I repeat, it-was-NOT-a-meteor!
Are you listening? It was NOT a meteor!!!
The Earth is NOT entering a planet decimating cloud of asteroid debris knocked into a lower orbit from the Kuiper Belt by the unignited twin sun which accounts for the weird wobble in all the solar orbits. Do not panic. Keep on buying things. Ignore the severe population control measures being put into place under the guise of fighting terrorism. Or consider. . .
All the new moons observed around our gas giants; The new moon population jumped from single digits to 50 - 80 new moons per gas giant. Many explain this by pointing to our increasingly powerful telescopes. The only problem. . . The new moons were discovered around the furthest to nearest planets in descending order through time, starting with Neptune. Could it be big rocks being caught up by the big gravity sources as the comet cluster heads Sun-ward? Hmm. The Shoemaker-Levy asteroid hit Jupiter in 1994; the most recent evidence from the incoming debris. It is estimated that it can take about 9 years for the bulk of the comet cluster to reach Earth. Which leaves us with just enough time for one more messed up election.
It was not a meteor. But this was.
-FL
Negative emotions are certainly tied to behavioral mechanisms, but they nonetheless have an energetic quality. This is not human-centric. It's life-centric. Since aliens are also alive, it's a common denominator which we share with them. Our technology and perceived limits of physical reality are not. The original poster was making a false assumption with regard to this.
And then you go on to complain about how media and schools have an aversion to science while posting gibberish which flies in the face of every even slightly credible scientific worldview.
You only think I'm talking gibberish because you happen to be ignorant. Your concept of a 'credible scientific worldview' is limited by the media you watch and the education you received. Circular logic, I know, however it also happens to be correct.
I could go an and refute every single one of your points in detail, but I bet you are not in it for discussion, judging by your casual dismissal of Carl Sagan.
You could try, but seeing as you still believe in the orthodox explanation of reality, it means you probably don't know how to challenge conventional thinking and thus have little in the arsenal of your mind beyond the regular canned nonsense most sleepers come pre-installed with. For instance. . . Carl Sagan is an astrophysicist. Why do you believe this gives him any authority in the matter of UFOs? What does stellar chemistry and gravity modeling have to do with understanding alien intent?
-FL
You are thinking too human-centric.
Consider the following possibility. . .
Aliens exist in a higher state of reality than we can perceive; that is, they are with us right now, all the time. They function and exist in a state where time does not exist for them in the same way it does for us. That is, the thousands of UFO reports are not of nuts and bolts technology, but of bits of reality poking through into ours.
Second. . . What if these aliens are to us what we are to cows. That they are here to eat us. What if they consume the energy from negative emotions such as fear and pain. This would explain our high population, our constant state of screwed up religion, war and general suffering around the globe. It also explains our media's and our education system's aversion of looking at sciences which would help explain the alien presence. That of being living on the "spirit plane", (so to speak). Of chi and magic in general.
This explanation, as distasteful as it sounds, nonetheless answers all the puzzles presented to us be the short-sighted Carl Sagans of the world. Sci-fi wants us to think in terms of other humans from space. It doesn't look at the idea that aliens are far more intelligent and have no interest in communicating with us beyond manipulation and control.
Look at our cattle industry. --We breed an entire race of animals totally controlled for our consumption. Aliens need to eat too.
As above, so below.
-FL