This is all well and good, but it really only goes to show that people are the victims of bias.
Showing evidence of a rock in my back yard versus an alien in my back yard should be a nearly identical exercise; that of pointing to a rock or an alien. That one should remain mundane while the other extraordinary speaks not of the quality of evidence but of the mental state of the observer.
The problem is that Sagan's famous little catch-phrase suggests otherwise, and people have certainly bought into it, thus neatly invalidating, as you point out, anecdotal evidence, photographic evidence and other varieties of evidence which would normally be acceptable in at least raising curiosity in most other circumstances. And why? Because the public belief system has chosen to pretend that a significant piece of reality does not exist and refuses to budge from that position.
anecdotal accounts are unpersuasive because even highly intelligent people are fully capable of grand self-delusion.
This is true, but there is a point when the balance must tip. I often point to Richard Dolan's research. He detailed nearly 300 UFO encounters in his book, though he only chose to include encounters which had a) multiple witnesses, and b) witnesses who were military personnel, police or pilots, all of whom were required to keep official records of the events in question. Many of the encounters were utterly stunning in scope; not mere mystery lights but close encounters. He also detailed clearly through official documents how the government was deliberately misleading the American people into thinking that the UFO's they were seeing were little more than figments and errors of perception, essentially hoodwinking the public through agencies such as Project Blue Book.
Why should Sagan have bothered to state such a meaningless thing as, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" except to cash in on the sensationalist value of a cute sound-bite? Sagan was a pop-culture figure of little worth, in my opinion, with regard to the question of UFO's and extraterrestrial life. Just because one is a clever astrophysicist does not mean one holds useful insight. I'd feel more confidence in asking a military pilot about the nature of flying objects than a man who spent his life thinking about the mathematics behind black holes.
The front page of any newspaper at the time probably would have sufficed.
Perhaps. However, maintaining journalist friends both of the print and television variety has taught me the value in avoiding state-installed lies masquerading as 'truth'. I have little patience for newspapers. Though, I do now recall hearing that Sagan had died. I just can't have cared very much and so promptly forgot it. Popular figures are generally full of nonsense by the time they are 'newsworthy'.
It's your job to convince me. You fail.
Hm. That's a common misnomer. --That is, if I happen to know something of which you are ignorant, then how exactly have I failed if you continue being ignorant while I continue knowing more than you? I measure success in terms of how much I learn, not by how stubbornly unaware I manage to remain.
--The weird tendency to make the fortification of ignorance into a virtue is a tactic used by the same people who brought us newspapers.
The amount of commentary heard from Carl Sagan took a sharp decline in 1996, when he died.
Hm. I guess I should pay closer attention to obituaries for popular astrophysicists.
You're still free to show us the data, assuming the Men In Black haven't taken it away from you.
Well, all I did was use Google and Amazon. Anybody with a few days and a desire to seek can do that. When you were in school you didn't ask other kids to do your homework. Why start now?
Talking about energy and higher levels of awareness is always a dicey affair on Slashdot. I've spent a lot of time with entrenched cult-of-science dogmatists who don't actually know how to think rationally, but rather cling to belief systems for the perceived sense of safety and order which they promise. Fear-ridden science geeks are over-bearing by design. They honestly think they are right, and when you finally demonstrate to them that they are not, they get all flustered and messed up, which hurts, and so they'll go to any irrational length to avoid seeing. Fighting to be ignorant? What a scenario!
Science is the attempt to document and reduce observation and learn from it without bias. But look at this entire series of over 200 posts; we have in evidence mountains of unsupported claims: "PEAR used faulty experiments!" "PEAR uses faulty statistical analysis!" "If PEAR had real evidence, why not apply to James Randi?" and similar mindless blather. How many of these posters have actually read the source material before rendering their judgments? How many links are provided? How many of them are self-referencing nonsense? I don't know; I've not looked myself; I don't actually know anything much about PEAR, but at least I am willing to admit that much!
Indeed. Fume and spit and fill the air with noise, but please do not mistake this for meaningful discourse. It's just the sound of fear and bias. If people honestly used the science they claim to love properly, then I suspect this whole site would look rather different!
Carl Sagan's understanding of the UFO phenomenon was severely limited when he was making his oft-quoted statements. If he continues to this day to be making such comments, then he is simply ignorant of the data currently available.
Anyway, who gets to determine which claims happen to be extraordinary and which are not? One's level of insight and knowledge makes such things entirely relative. --And what on earth is wrong with regular, garden-variety evidence? What exactly is "Extraordinary Evidence"?
Rationality is more helpful than dogma, even if it happens to come from a famous who lacks insight.
The point I find fascinating about the Global Consciousness Project is not the correlation of random number spikes with real-world events.
Nope.
The thing I find interesting about the Global Consciousness Project is that random number generators placed all over the globe all spike at the same time.
Isn't it odd how this and other such amazing items of note are apparently rendered invisible to the sceptic while boring strawman ideas are tilted at with such vigor?
Therefore: My solution is to immediately kill off 30% of the population of humans -- about 2 billion people -- and another 3% of the remaining population every year thereafter. Though, since I am skeptical of the "humans cause global warming" theory, I propose that only those altruistic souls that want to save the planet are killed first. I, and the rest of the skeptics, will be driving my SUV around much less congested freeways with $0.10/litre fuel. Where do I get my cheque?
Actually, that's the general plan. --Except you need to increase the kill-off rate from 30% to about 97%. And sorry, but sceptics will be going through the grinder along with everybody else; they'll just be more surprised when the axe falls. Only the elites who are driving WWIII and the various disease outbreaks, etc. are wealthy enough to have their own underground bunkers.
Your cheque will be worth exactly nothing when the economy crashes.
another version of the infamous social engineering campaign used by the expensive P.R. companies.
Step 1. Create a public news sensation using scientific data from a free source. (i.e. Something like Cold Fusion, but through a wiki) Step 2. Show scientists getting excited about information from free sources. Probably use a plant to get it started. Step 3. Slam dunk the game by having somebody "discover" that the data was faulty/stolen/dirty/evil etc., and blame it entirely on the free information movement.
You KNOW they're thinking about this. The only thing which would stop them is lack of money and maneuvering room.
Very well. Write as you will. I spent a fair bit of time trying to understand my instinctive desire to correct your approach. A mix of a desire to help and to destroy. Pack instinct. Hmm.
The reason I spent time wondering is that I've never liked systems which try to remove individuality and force conformity. Feeling a force within me which comes from exactly that place which I've always despised is a curious and somewhat alarming thing so I spent time trying to figure it out.
The best I came up with was the following. . .
I think it has to do with the perception of disharmony. You deliberately do not fit the medium through a means which I now realize might have been aggressively chosen. Before I thought it was due to poor self-esteem and a desire to fit in with skater/hacker/disenfranchised-teen culture which offers some solace through its, "We hurt but at least we're all hurting together," head-space. I thought, "There is a better way; simply stop hurting and find strength and happiness within the self." I tried to put forth that intent, although it was an effort to do so because there was also the desire to reshape your typing style because I thought it was ugly and disharmonious. Like a sour note in the middle of a song.
Then I realized with your response that there was something more going on; that there was a rebelliousness and sneering quality to your approach, which is probably where the hackles raised; the way I have chosen to type and which I see works best is being attacked by somebody who has deliberately chosen differently. I must defend 'My Way'!
Which boils down to: Poster doesn't fit because either A) He doesn't think he is strong enough and only needs a bit of help to sing clearly, or B) Because the Poster find the current system repulsive and attacks it through deliberately choosing a different way and inserting it in a manner which causes disharmony.
Are these responses healthy on my part? I don't know. I'm still pondering that. That exploration in itself is the important thing.
Whatever the case. . , I strongly suspect that this type of experience will happen over and over again for you, (you seemed to indicate that it already has done), until you finally understand the source of your deliberate disharmony and figure out what it means for you and why you do it. I'm guessing you have put forth a big lump of further thought on the subject in the last week. I'd be curious to know what you came up with. I've offered my guesses, but they aren't worth much since the real motivation comes from within you. I've got my own stuff to figure out, namely, where the balance of individuality, rebellion, harmony and repressiveness all fit together and why I react the way I do. Again, I've made my own guesses, and I'll have to see how I move forth from this point.
In any case, this has been a challenging and fascinating bit of back-and-forth. Thank-you.
I'm betting that the agencies in charge of law enforcement know who the perps are. --It's easy. All you do is look at the records of who made profits on a given trade. With enough samples over enough time, you can track down some recurring names. (A little basic detective work which, I must say, should have been one of the first steps in hunting down those connected to 9-11; numerous big sells occurred the morning of that grim day in many of the key companies affected by the attack. Of course, for the authorities to initiate such an investigation one would need to assume that those at the top of the U.S. power pyramid actually wanted the criminals caught, which by their inaction, one can surmise that they do not.)
The only difference between the 9-11 traders and the P&D traders is that the P&D guys most likely spent energy making the name holders of the shares hidden through some kind of proxy. --Like, "Hey buddy, here's some money. Buy the shares we tells ya and then give us back the profit. Do this little favor for us and maybe we'll consider not breaking your fingers."
Still, even with this layer of hidden-ness in place, it doesn't stop a detective from detecting. Or, sadly, from taking a fat envelope. The pattern of organized crime remains the same no matter what country you happen to be an organized criminal in.
But setting all of that aside, I have to point the blame stick at Bill Gates. If he sold an OS which could not be so easily corrupted and turned to the creation of bot-nets, then the activities of greedy people would stay in their little bubbles of misery and wouldn't taint everybody else's in-box.
Bill is a corrupt, grasping, back-stabbing jerk whose negative intent sours the world.
ahh the old "i-have-nothing-to-add-so-ill-criticize-capitaliza tion" gag. the same old crap cleverly hidden beneath this well written veneer of bullshit. but i got a few minutes so ill bite.
Added content? Fine. As per your point in the original. . .
The researchers used a single photon to cast the shadow from a complex image, (the 'UR' stencil). This was achieved through the fact that a photon is also a wave and waves can carry more data than a single on-off state. This is because a wave is not a single, defined object but rather a motion through another medium which, in this case, we do not fully understand the nature of.
Since human eyes cannot detect the light from a single photon/wave, their device generated a computer graphic to explain what it could see. The graphic displayed on the website is just an interpreted visualization of what their sensing device recorded, and as such uses a lot more data and photons to do the same job for our eyes.
As for my comments regarding 'i's. . .
for the record. i dont have time to capitalize my i's, and neither do you, we live in a fast paced world, time is money. so basically your saying that your time is worth less than mine.
That's ridiculous and you know it.
I didn't realize that it was a chip on your shoulder. It struck me as a self-esteem issue, so I thought I might comment to some benefit. But since it was a chip, (which the bearer wants somebody to notice and have knocked off so that they can experience the joy of being righteously indignant), then I'm similarly happy to oblige.
Public forum posting is all about expressing views, particularly when they are being called for.
Did they store the image on ONE photon, or did they store it on MULTIPLE photons. Also, they didn't define what they meant by 'image'. Did they mean 'image' in a sense like storing a photograph of yourself, or did they mean 'image' in the sense that it is an energy level that only codes for ONE PIXEL in an image? From the "UR" sample images, it appears that they were able to only code each individual photo so that it functions as a pixel, rather than an image. Remember, there is a difference between pixels and images.
This article was not well written, so confusion is understandable.
As I understood it, the researchers used a single photon to cast the shadow from a complex image, (the 'UR' stencil). This was achieved through the fact that a photon is also a wave and waves can carry more data than a single on-off state. This is because a wave is not a single, defined object but rather a motion through another medium which, in this case, we do not fully understand the nature of.
Since human eyes cannot detect the light from a single photon/wave, their device generated a computer graphic to explain what it could see. The graphic displayed on the website is just an interpreted visualization of what their sensing device recorded, and as such uses a lot more data and photons to do the same job for our eyes.
why not capitalize your "i"s? people who don't capitalize their eyes type as though they are small and unworthy. they all sound like weak and sad teens who have been beaten down by life, who truly believe they are small. are you small? are you easily blown over by the slightest wind?
With capitalization, I re-enforce my own value every time I hit, "Shift-I". I am not small. I am significant; a strong, smart, elastic force poorly described by a lower-case 'i'. (And no, it's not about ego, but rather about having respect for the creative force from which we are all made.) --It's all about self-love; you MUST love the self; if you do not, you cannot grow, you cannot be loved in return. I know this sounds like dollar-store self-help, but so what? It's True and it's Important. We are all worthy of self-love, but you cannot claim or use that power unless you allow yourself to do so. Every time you attack your own sense of self-worth by thinking of yourself as insignificant and un-vital and unworthy, you create that through proof of being. You limit and diminish yourself. --Your focus really does determine your reality. If you hate yourself, then misery will be drawn into your life to show you that you are right. Guaranteed.
Despite the image sold to us by weekly pop-culture news papers and the like, there is absolutely nothing noble about embracing darkness and a cynical, sad outlook. It does not bring you closer to awareness; rather it takes people who are beginning to grow their awareness and it locks them down by selling the lie of powerlessness. Just another form of media-driven slavery.
Shine bright and make waves. Or go crawl off and die while nobody cares. You don't win points for being a loser, except of course in the form of approval from other sad and powerless beings. --A clever system of reinforcement. Do you cringe from me now? Do you wince and think, "ugh, i can't stand these bright people who speak of self-love and positive thinking!" (we hates them, precious!) That's more programming. Shed it. You are worth far, far more than that.
Your comments relevant to the article, btw, are similarly limited. You missed the point several times. I'm guessing that this and your small i's are related.
Now, of course, I am making a bazillion assumptions with all of this, and I very much hope that I am totally wrong. If I am, then please drop my comments at once and move on in lightness knowing in strength who you really are.
Big Eyes. A limited self can only see a limited universe. Perception is Power.
If the article really comes from a Fulan Gong publication, then that would sort of explain using a two year-old story to ramp up the perceived threat of China; they hate the Chinese government. Nonetheless, the Fulan Gong are one of the more messed up cults around. Sort of the Chinese equivalent to Scientology.
They're both into binding vampiric energy beasties to people. I've read the literature for both and if you know about energy, then you quickly realize that they're scary beyond just being creepy cults which claim to empower people while really doing the opposite. (Like most religions.)
Unlike the Scientologists who keep their weird experiments in dark spirituality behind closed doors, the Fulan Gong people actually put the super-offending stuff right out there in their basic literature. They tell you that when have access to one of their masters, you have the privilege of having a 'Fulan' attached to your personal energy structure. A Fulan is a living energetic creature which exists in the energy plane only, and it's supposed to give you all these extra powers. --This is described in the books they give away! What I don't get is that if you know about energy, (which most Chinese do, and everybody who joins the Fulan Gong does by default), then what insanity has to overcome you to allow somebody to attach another entity to your own? That's like deliberately ingesting a tape worm!
I have a neighbor who built a house within a house; the interior is a vaulted tunnel structure, and the exterior shell is made from breaze-blocks supporting an A-frame roof. With a minimum of two feet of space separating the walls of the two structures, there's plenty of room for insulation.
The interior is heated with a single wood-stove. It also uses deep-well windows fixed to aim at the Sun during the Winter months, using glass treated with a one-way filter for IR light. Even in the depths of Winter, you find yourself stripping down to tank-tops and tee shirts at almost no fuel expenditure. This is the most impressive use of insulation I've ever heard of. I don't know any of the R-values or other engineering quantities of the various materials.
Insulation. It isn't sexy, but when applied properly, it's the single cheapest and most effective way to keep a home warm in the winter.
By contrast, I was renting a 100 year-old house with terrible insulation; even with a new roof and lots of high-tech fiberglass pink, we were paying stupid heating bills which were basically a quarter of our monthly rent. Sounds like your situation.
As an experiment, I lined one of the exterior walls, (on the inside), with tin foil which I covered over with cloth, leaving about an inch of space between the cloth and the foil. The idea is that the foil reflects the IR back into the room. (Like an empty chip bag; when you hold your hand inside and do not touch the plastic/foil then your hand quickly starts to heat up.) This in combination with the facts that heat rises, and that the room was on the top floor, the results were that it was the coziest room in the whole building; always at least 5 to 10 degrees warmer than anywhere else in the house under normal heating conditions.
When I finally get around to building my own place, I'll be investing heavily the smart use of lots of insulation. Buying lots of heating fuel or electricity to heat should be totally unnecessary given the technology we currently possess.
The worst part of Thunderbird is that it doesn't actually delete messages, and so, especially with tons of spam incoming, the email program gets very slow in starting up even after only a few weeks of use because it has to process 1000 or more messages for every 100 you save.
Does the Seamonkey email program have this problem?
And why doesn't anybody bother fixing this? It cannot be that hard to shift things so that emails are saved as individual files or to write a program which retroactively breaks up the giant inbox file into a bunch of smaller ones.
I gave section 220 of the bill a skim. You may be right in your assessment, but I didn't spend long enough on it to really give it a solid think. What do other Slashdotters think?
Day starting. Gotta run.
-FL
SEC. 220. DISCLOSURE OF PAID EFFORTS TO STIMULATE GRASSROOTS LOBBYING.
(a) Definitions- Section 3 of the Act (2 U.S.C. 1602) is amended--
(1) in paragraph (7), by adding at the end of the following: `Lobbying activities include paid efforts to stimulate grassroots lobbying, but do not include grassroots lobbying.'; and
(2) by adding at the end of the following:
`(17) GRASSROOTS LOBBYING- The term `grassroots lobbying' means the voluntary efforts of members of the general public to communicate their own views on an issue to Federal officials or to encourage other members of the general public to do the same.
`(18) PAID EFFORTS TO STIMULATE GRASSROOTS LOBBYING-
`(A) IN GENERAL- The term `paid efforts to stimulate grassroots lobbying' means any paid attempt in support of lobbying contacts on behalf of a client to influence the general public or segments thereof to contact one or more covered legislative or executive branch officials (or Congress as a whole) to urge such officials (or Congress) to take specific action with respect to a matter described in section 3(8)(A), except that such term does not include any communications by an entity directed to its members, employees, officers, or shareholders.
`(B) PAID ATTEMPT TO INFLUENCE THE GENERAL PUBLIC OR SEGMENTS THEREOF- The term `paid attempt to influence the general public or segments thereof' does not include an attempt to influence directed at less than 500 members of the general public.
`(C) REGISTRANT- For purposes of this paragraph, a person or entity is a member of a registrant if the person or entity--
`(i) pays dues or makes a contribution of more than a nominal amount to the entity;
`(ii) makes a contribution of more than a nominal amount of time to the entity;
`(iii) is entitled to participate in the governance of the entity;
`(iv) is 1 of a limited number of honorary or life members of the entity; or
`(v) is an employee, officer, director or member of the entity.
All the people without jobs voted in the morning. They're mostly Democrat, so that's where you get those huge Democrat leads. When you support behavior like that, you're going to get those kind of results.
Massively broad-stroke, sound-bitten explanations of this nature may feel smart when you don't stop long enough to think about them, but other than providing an ego-boost to the person speaking them, they really serve no purpose other than to mislead.
There's a reason why guys like Noam Chompsky refuse to give fifteen-second comments to the news. He knows that global politics are very complex.
Your statement assumes that Democrats vote in the morning and Republicans vote in the evening because of employment demographs. It also assumes that polling only happens in the morning. And it also assumes that the proven and accepted long history of the accuracy of exit polls is irrelevant.
As it happens, ALL of these assumptions are erroneous. It would be helpful if you did more research and thinking before taking the luxury of resting easy in deceptively simple theories.
Then we do a typical "liberal" interview. This is where you take seleced quotes out of context, where you change the question asked, and maybe chop sections off the quotes. Say we ask him "What's your favorite TV reality show", and he replies "I really don't like any of them that I have seen". Now we change the question to "What do you think of Blacks", and attach this part of his response, "I really don't like any of them". This works really great for liberals.
The Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum contest between the good cop/bad cop political forum in the U.S. is totally broken, and indeed, is largely designed to divide and conquer the public. If you spend all your time angry at those who see reality differently and vote for the other group of criminals, then you will have wasted your energy. Liberals of good conscience have many valid points. So do Conservatives of good conscience. Good people don't want to rape the world, and there are plenty of good people on both sides of the divide; they just work from different behavioral sets. Putting them at war with one another leads to perpetual bickering while the real villainy goes down untouched.
Secondly, Bush Jr. may be self-deluded and foolish, but the administration and his puppeteers are more intelligent than he is. Bush Sr., for instance was cagey enough to remain the head of the CIA for a significant portion of his professional life. He and others like him are both smart enough and well connected enough to control Bush Jr. effectively. A lot of people were involved in the 9-11 corruption; Christian Apocalypse Occultism is linked to a significant portion of the shadow government, among other things. It's not about Liberals v.s. Conservatives. Not at all.
Only because the number of people voting against the Republicans was under-estimated. (It's always a tricky thing when your fake election needs to be land close to 50% in order to look believable.) And so there were an estimated 3 million votes given falsely through machine 'error' to the Republicans. The reason the Democrats won was that despite this, more people than expected went out to vote against the Republicans that day. I guess all the work done to suppress the truth about how America feels about the Bush regime confused the minds of those planning the false election. Evil often tends to shoot itself in the foot by falling for its own illusions.
As for there being no evidence. . . Silly. Use your eyes and ears. How do you think people learned about voting corruption thus far? There is a great deal of evidence for anybody who chooses to dig. So dig. Dig!
If 10% of the effort spent whining, was spent seeking reform, we'd have the cleanest election system ever.
Why is it that discussion, networking and learning with regard to how we are attacked and fed upon by psychopaths is always characterized by the attackers and their supporters as, "whining"?
--Ridicule is simply an attempt to make people feel too embarrassed to speak out against their attackers, and as such, reduce their ability to find support and strength in numbers. Strength in numbers is exactly what evil fears, and as such I find the intent behind ridicule despicable, as are most of the tools used by those dedicated to Self-Service.
I am thankful, however, that as learning about such tactics continues, (through precisely the discussion, networking you characterize as whining), such low-brow tactics become increasingly futile.
For Ridicule to work, Fear is required, and this is why the dark siders use it; self-service proceeds from a fundamental framework built on Fear. Those who work on the other polarity, however, are learning that fear is something which limits, and as such, are ever-less controlled by it. And so the Service-to-Self contingent will continue to punch the fear button through the use of ridicule and similar tactics, and will not be able to understand why it doesn't work. They cannot comprehend a world view which does not include fear, and this will be their downfall.
At to your other point; that politics is by its nature a dirty game and that Left and Right are both corrupt. This is true. It's "Good Cop, Bad Cop". But, -and this is the important point-, our job in this reality is to become aware. Just because we are not necessarily able to fix such systems, collecting knowledge remains vital. And believe it or not, knowing does indeed change the shape of our world in ways which are not immediately obvious. Knowing how we are manipulated offers the possibility of choice, without which there is not hope.
What next for slashdot? 9/11 conspiracy theories? Sheesh. I guess as long as it drives traffic the owners will be happy.
Just because the media has sold many people on the idea that conspiracy theories (which come equipped with mountains of evidence, motive & opportunity), doesn't mean that the brain-washing has been successful in all cases. Those who wish to explore and to know will always have to put up with attacks both subtle and gross from those who wish not to have their sleep disturbed.
The fallout from 9-11 and the 2004 election continues to affect the lives of billions. It is understandable why some would find this overwhelming and choose not to think about it.
But those who have the courage of a lion will not have the fate of a mouse.
I would agree with you, except to say that I would not characterize this as a particularly 'good' thing.
It's entirely possible to ensure that people pay high prices using tactics which are detrimental, and in the long run, ultimately destructive to society.
In a fully capitalist society, dumbing people down, making them sick and fearful and ignorant all help to contribute to reliable sales. Corporations engage in this war on humanity all the time. --Yes, such practices are good for the bottom line, but is the bottom line good for humanity as a whole? When all the dross is burned away, this is the fundamental debate people are left having with regard to capitalism, and I think that systems which constrain spiritual, physical and intellectual growth/health for profit are not good systems.
The oft-used counter-argument is that capitalist systems automatically balance these negative forces, but I tend to consider this merely wishful thinking as is evidenced by the continued downward spiral of culture we are witnessing today. --Unless, that is, the total collapse of society, (as seems to happen with empires), is baked into the equation. Usually, though, it is not and people are left standing amidst the ashes of revolution and war, (the final capitalist expressions of the competitive spirit), wondering what went wrong.
The answers, of course, are Fear and Greed.
Yoda summed up Fear perfectly, ("Fear leads to Anger, Anger leads to Hate, Hate leads to Suffering"). --And Greed is a direct expression of Fear which leads to unbalanced and uncontrolled consumption at the expense of compassion and/or knowledge. (ie., Knowing that to consume at the levels seen in the West means necessitating the creation of slave nations and blood-money wars requires one either to embrace ignorance or to dispense with compassion. Both are spiritually fatal conditions.)
DRM and the idea of Intellectual Property are based on fearful assumptions; that somebody who takes an idea from you somehow diminishes your being. People forget that to give openly also means that you can take openly as well. Greed collects for the purpose of collecting, whereas the healthy approach is to make oneself into a conduit; energy flows in and out, and as long as the flow is flowing, there is always an endless, fresh supply of energy to sustain yourself upon while at the same time you are facilitating the feeding of others. Since all energy comes from the Universe, largely from the Sun and the Earth, then so long as those two things persist, humans can act as healthy conduits and everybody will have enough. --But only so long as selfish behavior is set aside.
This, of course, is impossible, and this is why this reality of ours is a grand school for teaching love and faith and service through trial and error. Fear and Greed are self-punishing. Freedom only comes when you let Fear go.
In my series, a group of space-pirates slash political revolutionaries pilot a starship, carrying out geurilla attacks against the Federation, funded by smuggling contraband and looting Federation military ships. (OK, it is a little like Firefly, but that is just coincidence). They team up with the peaceful Klingons and Romulans, who have been victims of Federation sponsered genocide. Their five year mission, to build an rebel army capable of overthrowing the Federation, destroying Starfleet, and liberation the galaxy from imperialism and oppression!
This would assume that your observations about humanity in TNG were accurate, which I tend to believe are not. The intent behind the series is the important thing, and jaded cynicism was not part of Roddenberry's mandate. Despite the logical flaws you point out, (all of which can easily be argued in the other direction), TNG was meant to be a depiction of a positive future where people had conquered the forces of greed, selfishness, fear and ignorance.
I have found in my own life that the quality of existence in a given society depends largely on the particular people involved, and that beside this, the system of their governance is almost irrelevant. If everybody carries with them the intent to play nice and serve others, then even a prison block can become a paradise.
I liked TNG better than any of the other Trek series because this style of thinking shone through; I love the idea that the bridge crew didn't bicker and back-stab. I liked how if somebody experienced something which would have been typically ignored by others in another series, "I just had a weird flash where I saw and felt the ship explode. I have zero proof, but it felt incredibly real!", rather than ridiculed is instead openly discussed and explored. Wow! What a mode of human inter-relations to strive for! --Where people are mature enough to handle that, (on both sides). --TNG showed what people could aspire to be, and this was always Roddenberry's stated intent.
The intrigue and drama and cynicism of the later shows, and the gritty shittiness of shows like Battlestar Galactica, don't fit with my head-space. Some might say that they attempt to show humanity as it currently exists and as such offer a useful tool in understanding our present state, but I'm not so sure I agree with that assessment. I think instead people simply resonate more closely with such shows because they depict what they WANT to experience and explore in their own lives, and moreover, I think that such shows try on a certain level to derail human progress and offer a baseline negative behavioral template that the powers that be want people to emulate. (This is more so recently than back when DS9 aired).
All that given, I do like shows like Firefly wherein human growth and family and love were explored and given strength; I liked seeing good people strive to overcome their own dark natures and fight against against an evil empire. (Though, I thought the film dropped the ball.) --But that show's intent was very different from that of TNG.
Perverting Trek so that it fit a cynical viewpoint always bothered me, and its later incarnations never really appealed to me. If people want dark and gritty, then watch Battlestar Galactica, but don't mess with Trek. I think it's a good idea to keep some guiding lights rather than obsess on the darkness.
Another 'theory' is that as the polar ice melts, billions of tonnes of methane are released into the atmosphere.
I don't know it it's related, but perhaps that's why the birds are falling from the sky.
Another is not even a theory; it's that as the world heats up, more precipitation falls over the poles, which would explain the substantially thicker ice noted by satellites. Nobody seems to be talking about this little item.
The way it works is that things heat up, the ice melts fast around the edge and the snow falls at the poles making for more ice. --Along with all the methane released, (which speeds up the process), we have all this fresh water entering the oceans which changes the salinity levels in key spots. --Salinity plays a large role in how the Gulf Stream works, particularly at the point the hot water sinks when it reaches the end of its run in the North to begin its return trip back into the tropics. A big conveyor belt. However, as the water gets less salty, with lots of fresh water dumping into the ocean at the end of the Gulf Stream's run where the icebergs live, then the theory states that the hot water might stop sinking and that the world's heat conveyor would sputter and get all weird.
And what does 'weird' mean? I don't know exactly; I don't think anybody does, but I pause when I consider those endless fields of flash frozen mastodon in the Alaskan North. --And that flash frozen mastodon with undigested buttercups still in its mouth.
Still, nobody can predict the weather. I'm remain a bit more fascinated by all these rocks falling from the sky. Interesting times, no doubt!
It has been said that Bush and the people directing him are simply trying to prepare the world for disaster by putting into place the conditioning and systems required to manage billions of starving people. Harvest time is coming.
Slashdot Mirror
Showing evidence of a rock in my back yard versus an alien in my back yard should be a nearly identical exercise; that of pointing to a rock or an alien. That one should remain mundane while the other extraordinary speaks not of the quality of evidence but of the mental state of the observer.
The problem is that Sagan's famous little catch-phrase suggests otherwise, and people have certainly bought into it, thus neatly invalidating, as you point out, anecdotal evidence, photographic evidence and other varieties of evidence which would normally be acceptable in at least raising curiosity in most other circumstances. And why? Because the public belief system has chosen to pretend that a significant piece of reality does not exist and refuses to budge from that position.
anecdotal accounts are unpersuasive because even highly intelligent people are fully capable of grand self-delusion.
This is true, but there is a point when the balance must tip. I often point to Richard Dolan's research. He detailed nearly 300 UFO encounters in his book, though he only chose to include encounters which had a) multiple witnesses, and b) witnesses who were military personnel, police or pilots, all of whom were required to keep official records of the events in question. Many of the encounters were utterly stunning in scope; not mere mystery lights but close encounters. He also detailed clearly through official documents how the government was deliberately misleading the American people into thinking that the UFO's they were seeing were little more than figments and errors of perception, essentially hoodwinking the public through agencies such as Project Blue Book.
Why should Sagan have bothered to state such a meaningless thing as, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" except to cash in on the sensationalist value of a cute sound-bite? Sagan was a pop-culture figure of little worth, in my opinion, with regard to the question of UFO's and extraterrestrial life. Just because one is a clever astrophysicist does not mean one holds useful insight. I'd feel more confidence in asking a military pilot about the nature of flying objects than a man who spent his life thinking about the mathematics behind black holes.
-FL
Perhaps. However, maintaining journalist friends both of the print and television variety has taught me the value in avoiding state-installed lies masquerading as 'truth'. I have little patience for newspapers. Though, I do now recall hearing that Sagan had died. I just can't have cared very much and so promptly forgot it. Popular figures are generally full of nonsense by the time they are 'newsworthy'.
It's your job to convince me. You fail.
Hm. That's a common misnomer. --That is, if I happen to know something of which you are ignorant, then how exactly have I failed if you continue being ignorant while I continue knowing more than you? I measure success in terms of how much I learn, not by how stubbornly unaware I manage to remain.
--The weird tendency to make the fortification of ignorance into a virtue is a tactic used by the same people who brought us newspapers.
-FL
Hm. I guess I should pay closer attention to obituaries for popular astrophysicists.
You're still free to show us the data, assuming the Men In Black haven't taken it away from you.
Well, all I did was use Google and Amazon. Anybody with a few days and a desire to seek can do that. When you were in school you didn't ask other kids to do your homework. Why start now?
If you are really interested, then I would start with Richard Dolan and then take a look at the Cassiopean Transcripts.
-FL
Science is the attempt to document and reduce observation and learn from it without bias. But look at this entire series of over 200 posts; we have in evidence mountains of unsupported claims: "PEAR used faulty experiments!" "PEAR uses faulty statistical analysis!" "If PEAR had real evidence, why not apply to James Randi?" and similar mindless blather. How many of these posters have actually read the source material before rendering their judgments? How many links are provided? How many of them are self-referencing nonsense? I don't know; I've not looked myself; I don't actually know anything much about PEAR, but at least I am willing to admit that much!
Indeed. Fume and spit and fill the air with noise, but please do not mistake this for meaningful discourse. It's just the sound of fear and bias. If people honestly used the science they claim to love properly, then I suspect this whole site would look rather different!
-FL
Carl Sagan's understanding of the UFO phenomenon was severely limited when he was making his oft-quoted statements. If he continues to this day to be making such comments, then he is simply ignorant of the data currently available.
Anyway, who gets to determine which claims happen to be extraordinary and which are not? One's level of insight and knowledge makes such things entirely relative. --And what on earth is wrong with regular, garden-variety evidence? What exactly is "Extraordinary Evidence"?
Rationality is more helpful than dogma, even if it happens to come from a famous who lacks insight.
-FL
Nope.
The thing I find interesting about the Global Consciousness Project is that random number generators placed all over the globe all spike at the same time.
Isn't it odd how this and other such amazing items of note are apparently rendered invisible to the sceptic while boring strawman ideas are tilted at with such vigor?
-FL
Actually, that's the general plan. --Except you need to increase the kill-off rate from 30% to about 97%. And sorry, but sceptics will be going through the grinder along with everybody else; they'll just be more surprised when the axe falls. Only the elites who are driving WWIII and the various disease outbreaks, etc. are wealthy enough to have their own underground bunkers.
Your cheque will be worth exactly nothing when the economy crashes.
Have a nice day.
-FL
Step 1. Create a public news sensation using scientific data from a free source. (i.e. Something like Cold Fusion, but through a wiki)
Step 2. Show scientists getting excited about information from free sources. Probably use a plant to get it started.
Step 3. Slam dunk the game by having somebody "discover" that the data was faulty/stolen/dirty/evil etc., and blame it entirely on the free information movement.
You KNOW they're thinking about this. The only thing which would stop them is lack of money and maneuvering room.
You also know that everybody would fall for it.
-FL
The reason I spent time wondering is that I've never liked systems which try to remove individuality and force conformity. Feeling a force within me which comes from exactly that place which I've always despised is a curious and somewhat alarming thing so I spent time trying to figure it out.
The best I came up with was the following. . .
I think it has to do with the perception of disharmony. You deliberately do not fit the medium through a means which I now realize might have been aggressively chosen. Before I thought it was due to poor self-esteem and a desire to fit in with skater/hacker/disenfranchised-teen culture which offers some solace through its, "We hurt but at least we're all hurting together," head-space. I thought, "There is a better way; simply stop hurting and find strength and happiness within the self." I tried to put forth that intent, although it was an effort to do so because there was also the desire to reshape your typing style because I thought it was ugly and disharmonious. Like a sour note in the middle of a song.
Then I realized with your response that there was something more going on; that there was a rebelliousness and sneering quality to your approach, which is probably where the hackles raised; the way I have chosen to type and which I see works best is being attacked by somebody who has deliberately chosen differently. I must defend 'My Way'!
Which boils down to: Poster doesn't fit because either A) He doesn't think he is strong enough and only needs a bit of help to sing clearly, or B) Because the Poster find the current system repulsive and attacks it through deliberately choosing a different way and inserting it in a manner which causes disharmony.
Are these responses healthy on my part? I don't know. I'm still pondering that. That exploration in itself is the important thing.
Whatever the case. . , I strongly suspect that this type of experience will happen over and over again for you, (you seemed to indicate that it already has done), until you finally understand the source of your deliberate disharmony and figure out what it means for you and why you do it. I'm guessing you have put forth a big lump of further thought on the subject in the last week. I'd be curious to know what you came up with. I've offered my guesses, but they aren't worth much since the real motivation comes from within you. I've got my own stuff to figure out, namely, where the balance of individuality, rebellion, harmony and repressiveness all fit together and why I react the way I do. Again, I've made my own guesses, and I'll have to see how I move forth from this point.
In any case, this has been a challenging and fascinating bit of back-and-forth. Thank-you.
And good luck!
-FL
The only difference between the 9-11 traders and the P&D traders is that the P&D guys most likely spent energy making the name holders of the shares hidden through some kind of proxy. --Like, "Hey buddy, here's some money. Buy the shares we tells ya and then give us back the profit. Do this little favor for us and maybe we'll consider not breaking your fingers."
Still, even with this layer of hidden-ness in place, it doesn't stop a detective from detecting. Or, sadly, from taking a fat envelope. The pattern of organized crime remains the same no matter what country you happen to be an organized criminal in.
But setting all of that aside, I have to point the blame stick at Bill Gates. If he sold an OS which could not be so easily corrupted and turned to the creation of bot-nets, then the activities of greedy people would stay in their little bubbles of misery and wouldn't taint everybody else's in-box.
Bill is a corrupt, grasping, back-stabbing jerk whose negative intent sours the world.
-FL
Added content? Fine. As per your point in the original. . .
The researchers used a single photon to cast the shadow from a complex image, (the 'UR' stencil). This was achieved through the fact that a photon is also a wave and waves can carry more data than a single on-off state. This is because a wave is not a single, defined object but rather a motion through another medium which, in this case, we do not fully understand the nature of.
Since human eyes cannot detect the light from a single photon/wave, their device generated a computer graphic to explain what it could see. The graphic displayed on the website is just an interpreted visualization of what their sensing device recorded, and as such uses a lot more data and photons to do the same job for our eyes.
As for my comments regarding 'i's. . .
for the record. i dont have time to capitalize my i's, and neither do you, we live in a fast paced world, time is money. so basically your saying that your time is worth less than mine.
That's ridiculous and you know it.
I didn't realize that it was a chip on your shoulder. It struck me as a self-esteem issue, so I thought I might comment to some benefit. But since it was a chip, (which the bearer wants somebody to notice and have knocked off so that they can experience the joy of being righteously indignant), then I'm similarly happy to oblige.
Public forum posting is all about expressing views, particularly when they are being called for.
-FL
This article was not well written, so confusion is understandable.
As I understood it, the researchers used a single photon to cast the shadow from a complex image, (the 'UR' stencil). This was achieved through the fact that a photon is also a wave and waves can carry more data than a single on-off state. This is because a wave is not a single, defined object but rather a motion through another medium which, in this case, we do not fully understand the nature of.
Since human eyes cannot detect the light from a single photon/wave, their device generated a computer graphic to explain what it could see. The graphic displayed on the website is just an interpreted visualization of what their sensing device recorded, and as such uses a lot more data and photons to do the same job for our eyes.
-FL
With capitalization, I re-enforce my own value every time I hit, "Shift-I". I am not small. I am significant; a strong, smart, elastic force poorly described by a lower-case 'i'. (And no, it's not about ego, but rather about having respect for the creative force from which we are all made.) --It's all about self-love; you MUST love the self; if you do not, you cannot grow, you cannot be loved in return. I know this sounds like dollar-store self-help, but so what? It's True and it's Important. We are all worthy of self-love, but you cannot claim or use that power unless you allow yourself to do so. Every time you attack your own sense of self-worth by thinking of yourself as insignificant and un-vital and unworthy, you create that through proof of being. You limit and diminish yourself. --Your focus really does determine your reality. If you hate yourself, then misery will be drawn into your life to show you that you are right. Guaranteed.
Despite the image sold to us by weekly pop-culture news papers and the like, there is absolutely nothing noble about embracing darkness and a cynical, sad outlook. It does not bring you closer to awareness; rather it takes people who are beginning to grow their awareness and it locks them down by selling the lie of powerlessness. Just another form of media-driven slavery.
Shine bright and make waves. Or go crawl off and die while nobody cares. You don't win points for being a loser, except of course in the form of approval from other sad and powerless beings. --A clever system of reinforcement. Do you cringe from me now? Do you wince and think, "ugh, i can't stand these bright people who speak of self-love and positive thinking!" (we hates them, precious!) That's more programming. Shed it. You are worth far, far more than that.
Your comments relevant to the article, btw, are similarly limited. You missed the point several times. I'm guessing that this and your small i's are related.
Now, of course, I am making a bazillion assumptions with all of this, and I very much hope that I am totally wrong. If I am, then please drop my comments at once and move on in lightness knowing in strength who you really are.
Big Eyes. A limited self can only see a limited universe. Perception is Power.
-FL
They're both into binding vampiric energy beasties to people. I've read the literature for both and if you know about energy, then you quickly realize that they're scary beyond just being creepy cults which claim to empower people while really doing the opposite. (Like most religions.)
Unlike the Scientologists who keep their weird experiments in dark spirituality behind closed doors, the Fulan Gong people actually put the super-offending stuff right out there in their basic literature. They tell you that when have access to one of their masters, you have the privilege of having a 'Fulan' attached to your personal energy structure. A Fulan is a living energetic creature which exists in the energy plane only, and it's supposed to give you all these extra powers. --This is described in the books they give away! What I don't get is that if you know about energy, (which most Chinese do, and everybody who joins the Fulan Gong does by default), then what insanity has to overcome you to allow somebody to attach another entity to your own? That's like deliberately ingesting a tape worm!
-FL
The interior is heated with a single wood-stove. It also uses deep-well windows fixed to aim at the Sun during the Winter months, using glass treated with a one-way filter for IR light. Even in the depths of Winter, you find yourself stripping down to tank-tops and tee shirts at almost no fuel expenditure. This is the most impressive use of insulation I've ever heard of. I don't know any of the R-values or other engineering quantities of the various materials.
Insulation. It isn't sexy, but when applied properly, it's the single cheapest and most effective way to keep a home warm in the winter.
By contrast, I was renting a 100 year-old house with terrible insulation; even with a new roof and lots of high-tech fiberglass pink, we were paying stupid heating bills which were basically a quarter of our monthly rent. Sounds like your situation.
As an experiment, I lined one of the exterior walls, (on the inside), with tin foil which I covered over with cloth, leaving about an inch of space between the cloth and the foil. The idea is that the foil reflects the IR back into the room. (Like an empty chip bag; when you hold your hand inside and do not touch the plastic/foil then your hand quickly starts to heat up.) This in combination with the facts that heat rises, and that the room was on the top floor, the results were that it was the coziest room in the whole building; always at least 5 to 10 degrees warmer than anywhere else in the house under normal heating conditions.
When I finally get around to building my own place, I'll be investing heavily the smart use of lots of insulation. Buying lots of heating fuel or electricity to heat should be totally unnecessary given the technology we currently possess.
-FL
Does the Seamonkey email program have this problem?
And why doesn't anybody bother fixing this? It cannot be that hard to shift things so that emails are saved as individual files or to write a program which retroactively breaks up the giant inbox file into a bunch of smaller ones.
-FL
Day starting. Gotta run.
-FL
Massively broad-stroke, sound-bitten explanations of this nature may feel smart when you don't stop long enough to think about them, but other than providing an ego-boost to the person speaking them, they really serve no purpose other than to mislead.
There's a reason why guys like Noam Chompsky refuse to give fifteen-second comments to the news. He knows that global politics are very complex.
Your statement assumes that Democrats vote in the morning and Republicans vote in the evening because of employment demographs. It also assumes that polling only happens in the morning. And it also assumes that the proven and accepted long history of the accuracy of exit polls is irrelevant.
As it happens, ALL of these assumptions are erroneous. It would be helpful if you did more research and thinking before taking the luxury of resting easy in deceptively simple theories.
-FL
The Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum contest between the good cop/bad cop political forum in the U.S. is totally broken, and indeed, is largely designed to divide and conquer the public. If you spend all your time angry at those who see reality differently and vote for the other group of criminals, then you will have wasted your energy. Liberals of good conscience have many valid points. So do Conservatives of good conscience. Good people don't want to rape the world, and there are plenty of good people on both sides of the divide; they just work from different behavioral sets. Putting them at war with one another leads to perpetual bickering while the real villainy goes down untouched.
Secondly, Bush Jr. may be self-deluded and foolish, but the administration and his puppeteers are more intelligent than he is. Bush Sr., for instance was cagey enough to remain the head of the CIA for a significant portion of his professional life. He and others like him are both smart enough and well connected enough to control Bush Jr. effectively. A lot of people were involved in the 9-11 corruption; Christian Apocalypse Occultism is linked to a significant portion of the shadow government, among other things. It's not about Liberals v.s. Conservatives. Not at all.
-FL
Only because the number of people voting against the Republicans was under-estimated. (It's always a tricky thing when your fake election needs to be land close to 50% in order to look believable.) And so there were an estimated 3 million votes given falsely through machine 'error' to the Republicans. The reason the Democrats won was that despite this, more people than expected went out to vote against the Republicans that day. I guess all the work done to suppress the truth about how America feels about the Bush regime confused the minds of those planning the false election. Evil often tends to shoot itself in the foot by falling for its own illusions.
As for there being no evidence. . . Silly. Use your eyes and ears. How do you think people learned about voting corruption thus far? There is a great deal of evidence for anybody who chooses to dig. So dig. Dig!
-FL
Why is it that discussion, networking and learning with regard to how we are attacked and fed upon by psychopaths is always characterized by the attackers and their supporters as, "whining"?
--Ridicule is simply an attempt to make people feel too embarrassed to speak out against their attackers, and as such, reduce their ability to find support and strength in numbers. Strength in numbers is exactly what evil fears, and as such I find the intent behind ridicule despicable, as are most of the tools used by those dedicated to Self-Service.
I am thankful, however, that as learning about such tactics continues, (through precisely the discussion, networking you characterize as whining), such low-brow tactics become increasingly futile.
For Ridicule to work, Fear is required, and this is why the dark siders use it; self-service proceeds from a fundamental framework built on Fear. Those who work on the other polarity, however, are learning that fear is something which limits, and as such, are ever-less controlled by it. And so the Service-to-Self contingent will continue to punch the fear button through the use of ridicule and similar tactics, and will not be able to understand why it doesn't work. They cannot comprehend a world view which does not include fear, and this will be their downfall.
At to your other point; that politics is by its nature a dirty game and that Left and Right are both corrupt. This is true. It's "Good Cop, Bad Cop". But, -and this is the important point-, our job in this reality is to become aware. Just because we are not necessarily able to fix such systems, collecting knowledge remains vital. And believe it or not, knowing does indeed change the shape of our world in ways which are not immediately obvious. Knowing how we are manipulated offers the possibility of choice, without which there is not hope.
Knowledge protects. Ignorance endangers.
-FL
Just because the media has sold many people on the idea that conspiracy theories (which come equipped with mountains of evidence, motive & opportunity), doesn't mean that the brain-washing has been successful in all cases. Those who wish to explore and to know will always have to put up with attacks both subtle and gross from those who wish not to have their sleep disturbed.
The fallout from 9-11 and the 2004 election continues to affect the lives of billions. It is understandable why some would find this overwhelming and choose not to think about it.
But those who have the courage of a lion will not have the fate of a mouse.
-FL
A real capitalist answers "D".
I would agree with you, except to say that I would not characterize this as a particularly 'good' thing.
It's entirely possible to ensure that people pay high prices using tactics which are detrimental, and in the long run, ultimately destructive to society.
In a fully capitalist society, dumbing people down, making them sick and fearful and ignorant all help to contribute to reliable sales. Corporations engage in this war on humanity all the time. --Yes, such practices are good for the bottom line, but is the bottom line good for humanity as a whole? When all the dross is burned away, this is the fundamental debate people are left having with regard to capitalism, and I think that systems which constrain spiritual, physical and intellectual growth/health for profit are not good systems.
The oft-used counter-argument is that capitalist systems automatically balance these negative forces, but I tend to consider this merely wishful thinking as is evidenced by the continued downward spiral of culture we are witnessing today. --Unless, that is, the total collapse of society, (as seems to happen with empires), is baked into the equation. Usually, though, it is not and people are left standing amidst the ashes of revolution and war, (the final capitalist expressions of the competitive spirit), wondering what went wrong.
The answers, of course, are Fear and Greed.
Yoda summed up Fear perfectly, ("Fear leads to Anger, Anger leads to Hate, Hate leads to Suffering"). --And Greed is a direct expression of Fear which leads to unbalanced and uncontrolled consumption at the expense of compassion and/or knowledge. (ie., Knowing that to consume at the levels seen in the West means necessitating the creation of slave nations and blood-money wars requires one either to embrace ignorance or to dispense with compassion. Both are spiritually fatal conditions.)
DRM and the idea of Intellectual Property are based on fearful assumptions; that somebody who takes an idea from you somehow diminishes your being. People forget that to give openly also means that you can take openly as well. Greed collects for the purpose of collecting, whereas the healthy approach is to make oneself into a conduit; energy flows in and out, and as long as the flow is flowing, there is always an endless, fresh supply of energy to sustain yourself upon while at the same time you are facilitating the feeding of others. Since all energy comes from the Universe, largely from the Sun and the Earth, then so long as those two things persist, humans can act as healthy conduits and everybody will have enough. --But only so long as selfish behavior is set aside.
This, of course, is impossible, and this is why this reality of ours is a grand school for teaching love and faith and service through trial and error. Fear and Greed are self-punishing. Freedom only comes when you let Fear go.
-FL
This would assume that your observations about humanity in TNG were accurate, which I tend to believe are not. The intent behind the series is the important thing, and jaded cynicism was not part of Roddenberry's mandate. Despite the logical flaws you point out, (all of which can easily be argued in the other direction), TNG was meant to be a depiction of a positive future where people had conquered the forces of greed, selfishness, fear and ignorance.
I have found in my own life that the quality of existence in a given society depends largely on the particular people involved, and that beside this, the system of their governance is almost irrelevant. If everybody carries with them the intent to play nice and serve others, then even a prison block can become a paradise.
I liked TNG better than any of the other Trek series because this style of thinking shone through; I love the idea that the bridge crew didn't bicker and back-stab. I liked how if somebody experienced something which would have been typically ignored by others in another series, "I just had a weird flash where I saw and felt the ship explode. I have zero proof, but it felt incredibly real!", rather than ridiculed is instead openly discussed and explored. Wow! What a mode of human inter-relations to strive for! --Where people are mature enough to handle that, (on both sides). --TNG showed what people could aspire to be, and this was always Roddenberry's stated intent.
The intrigue and drama and cynicism of the later shows, and the gritty shittiness of shows like Battlestar Galactica, don't fit with my head-space. Some might say that they attempt to show humanity as it currently exists and as such offer a useful tool in understanding our present state, but I'm not so sure I agree with that assessment. I think instead people simply resonate more closely with such shows because they depict what they WANT to experience and explore in their own lives, and moreover, I think that such shows try on a certain level to derail human progress and offer a baseline negative behavioral template that the powers that be want people to emulate. (This is more so recently than back when DS9 aired).
All that given, I do like shows like Firefly wherein human growth and family and love were explored and given strength; I liked seeing good people strive to overcome their own dark natures and fight against against an evil empire. (Though, I thought the film dropped the ball.) --But that show's intent was very different from that of TNG.
Perverting Trek so that it fit a cynical viewpoint always bothered me, and its later incarnations never really appealed to me. If people want dark and gritty, then watch Battlestar Galactica, but don't mess with Trek. I think it's a good idea to keep some guiding lights rather than obsess on the darkness.
-FL
I don't know it it's related, but perhaps that's why the birds are falling from the sky.
Another is not even a theory; it's that as the world heats up, more precipitation falls over the poles, which would explain the substantially thicker ice noted by satellites. Nobody seems to be talking about this little item.
The way it works is that things heat up, the ice melts fast around the edge and the snow falls at the poles making for more ice. --Along with all the methane released, (which speeds up the process), we have all this fresh water entering the oceans which changes the salinity levels in key spots. --Salinity plays a large role in how the Gulf Stream works, particularly at the point the hot water sinks when it reaches the end of its run in the North to begin its return trip back into the tropics. A big conveyor belt. However, as the water gets less salty, with lots of fresh water dumping into the ocean at the end of the Gulf Stream's run where the icebergs live, then the theory states that the hot water might stop sinking and that the world's heat conveyor would sputter and get all weird.
And what does 'weird' mean? I don't know exactly; I don't think anybody does, but I pause when I consider those endless fields of flash frozen mastodon in the Alaskan North. --And that flash frozen mastodon with undigested buttercups still in its mouth.
Still, nobody can predict the weather. I'm remain a bit more fascinated by all these rocks falling from the sky. Interesting times, no doubt!
It has been said that Bush and the people directing him are simply trying to prepare the world for disaster by putting into place the conditioning and systems required to manage billions of starving people. Harvest time is coming.
-FL