Build a big computer and drop it into a 'body' it controls. Make it capable of responding in ways which can change its environment based on input from that same environment. Basic feedback loop.
Through outside forces, make sure the environment is always changing, so the computer never hits a point of equilibrium. Can never stop re-calculating and responding.
Now, build a second computer with the same specs. Put it into the same body as the first one, give it the same ability to control the body and respond to the environment. Wire them together somewhat so that they can take input from each other, but each is responding to a slightly different perspective on the environment around them. Never in total agreement.
Think of two mirrors facing each other. Sort of. And then...
Magic!
Self awareness occurs somewhere in the space between those two computers.
Also, note how the human brain is divided into two halves.
Now go and spend the next hour puzzling over that. Have fun!
Been on this diet for a couple of years now. Works great. I feel awesome and I look awesome, and it doesn't take any real effort. (Though, you have to give blood to keep your iron down, take your magnesium and keep your vitamin C levels up). But if you DO a little training.., wow! Super hero muscles for nothing.
I don't buy the, "Oh, this time next decade, they'll be telling you the exact opposite!" apathetic complaints. People last decade were fat and unhealthy and heart disease was a problem. All the vegetarians I know are either too skinny and malnourished or fat and grey, and all of them are suffering from the brain fog of early onset dementia. God love 'em for their ethics, but honestly! I'd rather kill a cow than have a heart attack at 55. Sorry. I do promise to kill it nicely.
There is a fundamental truth which reality orbits around regardless of what you happen to believe or what the science magazines say. They may tell us the opposite next year, but they'll be wrong at best, and liars at worst.
Ye Olde Science Magazines are no better than religious pamphlets these days, so I'm going to go ahead and trust logic, my own research, community information sharing initiatives and my own five senses on this one, thanks.
I'm sick of trusting authority-based science when they tell me I'm the victim of magic show antics and that my senses are unreliable; that I can only trust my leaders. Fuck that! I know I'm not infallible, but I'm also pretty smart; I'm not a slave to my ego, scared to be wrong. I know how to correct for errors once I detect them. -Like if my gut started expanding and my heart started feeling fluttery and if my skin wasn't glowing with health on this high fat diet, I'd stop and go back to eating wheat and sugar. I don't need some fool in a government lab coat or some pill-salesman to tell me what to think.
I'm just amazed that acceptance of high fat/low carb diets is taking hold. The fact that something works usually means people are running in the opposite direction.
It makes me wonder if perhaps there isn't something worse we're missing which makes the optimal health we're learning to enjoy invalid; what could make lots of strong and healthy people a non-threat to the power establishment I wonder..?
If it wasn't a time-bomb what was it? It has to be in the cockpit, so it can't be transmitting signals or it would screw up the pilot's insturments and tip them off. It's 5-6 miles up so it can't be receiving signals passively.
I could only hazard guesses as to what sort of bomb and detonation technology is available to the black operations world, but I *very* much doubt it would be limited by such elementary concerns. This isn't the 1950's. Just using the stone-age technology available to regular Walmart shoppers, a bomb maker would have access to things like GPS technology. But this is a really silly debate. And we don't actually know if it would have had to have been in the cockpit. Ukraine is only just now allowing proper inspection of the crash debris, and what evidence there may be is going to be hopelessly polluted at this point. We have very little to go on, and the chances are we are simply not going to get any hard official evidence as to what really happened.
And you still haven't addressed the risk/reward problem. If Israel gets caught Israel dies. Period.
Yes I have. And no they wouldn't.
I'm not going to retread old ground by repeating myself; I've provided enough insight for you to go on at this point. Whether you take it into consideration is up to you. I will leave you with this, however:
Israel has survived so far because it has become expert in manipulating social and political fabrics so that it doesn't matter if it gets caught. They have been caught. Look at the numerous things Israel, or to be more accurate, the Zionist elements within Israel, (wouldn't want to implicate decent people just living there), have pulled and we know they've pulled.
They destroyed a U.S. navel vessel, (the USS Liberty), built a not-so-secret nuclear arsenal that everybody knew about while they were building it, and erected an actual *wall* around a captive population which they enact atrocities upon with impunity. -The latest ground assault which began on the same day as the downing of the passenger jet in question has killed over 2000 civilians, women and children, non-combatants.
Israel has already been 'caught' many times and it has not spelled the "end of Israel", nor will it.
Outing a spy operation isn't going to happen because even smoking gun evidence would not be good enough; too many people are devoted to not seeing. It's the word of conspiracy theorists against the mainstream media and Zionist-aligned politicians in Washington.
-I described conditioning and blackmail before, (which you seem to have ignored), but I did not mention the whole religious angle. The Christian ruling class *needs* Israel intact for their belief system to work.
Added all together, there was very simply never any significant risk of Israel being outed on this operation in any way that matters. The people who know, already know and they are heavily invested in not doing anything about it.
That's a lot to risk for some abstract reward of "distracting" people.
Except for the fact that it appears to have paid off with zero blow-back. Again.
Which suggests that your risk assessment isn't an accurate representation of the real situation.
Your clear-cut IF/THEN reasoning is not in and of itself at fault. However, (and I've pointed this out already), it stems from an 'official' reality where much of the relevant detail remains out of view. You cannot extrapolate accurately using faulty and missing base assumptions.
For instance... why do you assume a time bomb? Are there no other ways to detonate a device accurately?
That same over-simple thinking is evident in your understanding of politics. -And please, I am not trying to hurt you with insults. Ignorance is not a crime. That is not my intention in explaining this stuff. -Israel has provided a countless number of affronts, each worthy of universal embargo, and yet the UN security council has done nothing more than offer toothless condemnation, year after year. There are many reasons for this which you are not be taking into account.
The villains get away with this kind of thing regularly, (though, taking down a passenger jet is on the more ostentatious end of the spectrum). But overall, it's really nothing new, and the current system has been groomed to just roll with it. There really wasn't much of a risk of discovery because people don't *want* to discover that which would complicate the official narrative.
Consider some of the forces which are at play but which you have not included in your calculations...
1. Pre-established conditioning. Just look at how hard you are yourself fighting to reject the idea of Israeli involvement. Why? It's not because "Time bombs wouldn't work"; that was a rapidly devised invention introduced to make the unwanted idea go away; it wasn't even a concept beforehand. So.., why not Israel? And further, why seek a "why not Israel" at all? What is your motivation? It's just an idea, and one nobody would have even brought up if it didn't fit the events and the pre-existing pattern. Why does it automatically offend you and others? And how could such an automatic rejection be useful?
2. People in power have their dark secrets, many of them related to child sex rings which penetrate to high levels of global leadership. There are numerous reasons for this, and it is promoted and controlled; a way of criminals keeping each other's secrets safe and everybody under control. The Mossad has had its hands in this pie for a long time, likely because it is such a good way to control the official message. If you introduce that element to your risk assessment, how does that change things?
Those are just two elements, they are very real, (explore them rather than look for more broken time bombs to make the ugliness of it go away). There are numerous other elements at play which one needs to understand in order for reality to make sense.
-And also, bearing in mind that the bomb is just a theory.
It appears that there was indeed evidence of what looks like gunfire aimed at the cockpit. But we don't know anything for certain; all we can do is look at the influences known to exist and extrapolate. At this point, the most reasonable extrapolations based on known evidence and previously reduced extrapolations, puts the possibility of a deliberate Russian BUK missile attack deep into the zone of high improbability.
That's a logical distillation, granted. However, it is based on some critical over-simplications and assumptions which are not accurate wrt how the black world operates. The reality is rather more complicated (and interesting) in terms of what actually happened, what was reported, and the players who had influence on the outcome.
I'm afraid I don't have the time or energy to offer right now to explain it all at length, but here's one of the better reduxes of the whole scenario:
From the experiential pov of the person who cannot afford a $20 chocolate bar, the linear extrapolation is a perfectly valid means of explaining why he isn't going to be eating chocolate that day.
Market forces are real, sure, but they are over-used by the upper class as a means of pooh-poohing responsible resource management and the concerns of those who occupy economically vulnerable positions beneath them. Externalizing problems and reveling in base Greed are apparently more fun than thinking of others.
Right now, virtually all cocoa is harvested on the sweat and blood of unpaid child slaves. Non-linear market force philosophy isn't helping them any.
You appear to have posted before reading my other response to this very valid question...
(Also, you're rude and kind of crazy-sounding in your over-reaction.) I apologize to anybody just tuning in to this exchange for my blowing this trumpet more than once; I wouldn't have to if these gentlemen would just settle down and stop tunnel-visioning and calling names...
So...
On the day when the airliner was attacked, Israel launched a major ground offensive into Gaza. It's first in just over five years.
Now I don't know about sane, but if perhaps I were an Israeli war minister, I might take the precaution of tasking my spy network with setting up some kind of powerful distraction elsewhere in the world (like the crashing of a passenger plane on a hot border) to cause enough shock and awe that my rolling tanks and troops into the walled ghetto to bomb, shoot and terrorize an unarmed, starving, civilian population (who it is common knowledge, I truly, truly wish to see exterminated).., that such an unabashed war crime might be overlooked by the rest of the world, reeling as they will be with the horror and drama of a plane crash and hysterical nonsense about Russian missiles.
This tactic has a long and august history. But like I said, I've already explained it once already. I hope I don't have to do it again.
Just out of curiosity, what would Mossad have to gain from something like this? I could see them trying to give Al Queda or ISIL some bad press, but what would they have to gain from making Ukraine look bad?
That's a fair question.
On the morning when the airliner was attacked, world attention zeroed in on that event and failed to react to the Israeli ground offensive launched into Gaza.
The Israeli military has begun a ground offensive in Gaza â" the situation is still developing, and we have live updates overnight and into this morning.
The action is the first major Israeli ground offensive in Gaza in just over five years and would be open-ended, according to an Israeli military spokesman.
That's the micro. On the macro side, fanning war flames between the East and West will result in a lot of dangerous oil politics which generally sees the oppression of Israel's historic enemies.
When one charts the major offenses launched by Israel which have had the potential to raise the ire of the world, or when peace talks threaten to lead to real concessions, there has *always* been some kind of outrageous attack which galvanizes public attention on something other than the issue at hand. Then a few weeks later, when the world regains its senses, too much time has passed and everybody has forgotten what Israel has done.
Business as usual. Basically, Israel has better spycraft than the rest of us. (Of course, saying so is "anti-semitic"! Which is just another example of practical counter-intelligence.)
I'd put together a fake image which looks good enough to pass the sniff test for a day or two, but which is designed to "go off" shortly after when the public gets a chance to deconstruct it.
The results: "Ha! We, the West, have caught you red-handed, and we solved this problem ourselves, so we OWN the discovery! Now the belief that you are a sneaky and tricky enemy is connected to our feelings of self-worth, because we shall remind you, WE the public caught you red-handed because we are clever and discerning! Ha and Fie, I say, you blackguards!" (etc.)"
Seriously. Are the Russian secret services really SO bad at their job, that they didn't know exactly what the fallout would be upon releasing such a poor fake?
I'll answer that rhetorical for you: No. No, they're not. Their job is subversion and craftiness and they're really damned good at it, and they bloody well would not be so stupid as to not realize how such a photo would backfire.
But somebody did. In fact, somebody knew exactly what the fallout would be and they planned for it.
If anything is "obvious" here, it is that this is the propaganda equivalent of a False Flag attack.
My guess is CIA/Mossad.
Russia is only the enemy if you happen to be a Western/European Elitist 1%er trying to hold on to your pile of ill-gotten gains and legions of serfs.
Make sure the people are looking outward for an external enemy rather than at the psychopaths in power right here at home.
I think it's interesting, judging from the responses here, how many people are still carrying around deep wounds from grade school and junior high.
I don't say that with aspersion. Everybody is deeply affected by our childhood experiences. But I do think that until one can put these old wounds to rest, it's pretty much guaranteed that we will also be operating under just as thick a layer of automatic programming as Mrs. Sampson was, and maybe not even that different a variety.
I wonder what would happen if some smarmy kid came to you with rock-solid evidence that 2nd person perspective stories really were shitty?
Any programming which jumps in and acts out behaviors for us before we can rationally think about whether or not they're good for us, is worthy of review.
A question without judgment for you: Why not look at Mrs. Sampson as what she really was; a most-likely unremarkable middle-aged woman whose job it was to lead a roomful of young teens through a day of lessons and not lose her soul in the process? You were probably smarter than she was, if not more experienced. But if you never knew her, you'd probably also help her pick up her groceries if you saw her spill them in the parking lot.
The bigger question I have and which drives me: Why do we set up the education system the way we do? It seriously messes people up for life, installing all kinds of traumas and personality ticks which get in the way of personal development for nearly ever.
It's a worse problem, this installing idiotic 'safety' systems, than simply wasting money. (Or opportunistic companies trading on fear for their bread and butter.)
It raises the anxiety level, the hystericisation of a population. It's a way of telling kids and their families that the Threat Is Real! -Can you imagine going to a school every day knowing that there is a Real Danger of being shot that the adults are taking seriously enough to install monitoring systems?
The point of all these shootings is keep people in a traumatized state where rational thinking becomes increasingly difficult to the point where it's just easier to let the authorities do your thinking for you. -And yeah, I'm the guy who thinks that there is some dark side social engineering going on.
Kids are targeted who have the potential to change the world later on for the better. The dark side kids, and they are; it makes for an intriguing study to learn what those kids went on to do with the rest of their lives. I've found that they tend to become parts of the 'evil' support structure. And as kids, they know their path and purpose on a soul level; to destroy and feed and hope like hell (and spend nearly every active moment working to ensure) nobody singles them out for their own medicine. Make sure you have the right shoes and shift that spotlight of 'mean' to the next chicken down the pecking order.
If you are resonating on a different vibe, they naturally pick up on it and you are seen as the natural enemy. It's not magic. You know who the assholes in the room are when you spend enough time with them, and the reverse is true.
Even small butterflies count, so if they are quashed early on, the dark side wins a battle.
So, I'm glad you survived!
I hope you have also honed your social-fu and managed to not hate anybody. When the good kids grow up and get their act together, they can be ridiculously formidable. The dark-siders just decay over time, so they really do have to strike their enemies early, while their targets are still small and vulnerable.
It's almost as if the psychopaths who lead the human race are retarded assholes more interested in profiting from dumb violence which drags the creative principle down into the mud (and rapes it) rather than from doing things that are hard and exploratory and which propel human awareness and knowledge upwards.
Because, really, when we consider it, you can transfer just as much wealth from the public pocket to the private pocket by investing in space. It could STILL be a huge tax-skimming scam. And yet, it's just not good enough for the psychopath.
So it's got less to do with money, and more to do with an innate desire to defile the Creation.
I guess you can't defile as much when you're flying up to meet the universe in person than you can by being down in the mud murdering its children.
JFK pushed the space program forward. He wasn't killed for this reason, or any other single thing. Those animals killed him simply because he was Good.
It's a big country, and I'm sure there has to be some variance between values among people when you have a billion to choose from.
But...
Color me racist. No, please do. I really, really am.
India is a country where unwanted children are dumped like trash into the streets, corruption is considered normal and the atmosphere of hyper-competitiveness seems to push everybody's brain into a crazed kind of fight or flight mode which hampers every other human circuit. I can't be around Indian culture without wanting to hide under furniture to escape the crazy.
Wait. Hold on. This just in: Not racist, per se. Because, interestingly, people who are only one generation removed from that seething land mass are entirely capable of developing into excellent, entirely likable people who aren't completely batshit insane. So it's not genetic vile stupidity. It's cultural vile stupidity. Probably a lot like the heavy crime areas in the U.S. -Pull babies out of those places and raise them in bullet-free zones where people treat each other with dignity and love, and I'm sure you'll get fine, undamaged people that way also.
So, really, I don't care what genetic material you start with, if you force people to endure pressure-cooker lives of massive over-population limited resources and shitty infrastructure, combined with the momentum of hundreds of sustained years of dog-eat-dog corruption, you're going to end up with nothing but vast yields of psychologically damaged people.
India is a problem I don't know how to solve without basically wiping it clean of humans and starting again.
Maybe just the cities.
Folks in the rural areas sound less insane from the traveler's reports I've heard.
I bow to your superior knowledge! (Not being sarcastic.)
Thanks for sharing.
If I might bother you with a further question which has been on my mind, as I'm still trying to figure out what my own stance is on all of this. The information is, I am finding, really hard to nail down:
I've been unable to find any information about *how* these viruses are isolated and identified; the process and systems. All anybody ever seems to repeat are these cartoon-level bits of media copy, "Samples must be sent to a lab for verification" -where, apparently through some sort of black-box method, they are "verified". The same sentences are used over and over in every news release, saying essentially nothing. When I try to search-engine my way more deeply into the subject, I find little beyond this avalanche of noise.
The best I could locate was a user's maintenance manual.pdf for some sort of field deployable machine which I think might have been designed to perform a kind of electrical wave form analysis on wet samples, but it was altogether opaque, written for a select customer base who already know what they're doing.
Essentially, I want to know how it works, where it is reliable and where it is not, what gaps in the process exist, or if it is actually working at the Star Trek level. -Those gene charts you linked to; are they what they say they are and how can one know? Is there any spin? Any desire to accommodate funding sources with biases?
There's just too much I don't know about this, and I find I've been made hyper-sensitive due to stories about corruption in the scientific and medical communities and industry. We have little choice but to trust a process which is opaque, and where human nature offers plenty of reason to want to be extremely cautious. "Caveat Emptor", but how can one beware when un-polished knowledge is so hard to come by and so difficult to understand raw?
Knowing how it works would go a long damned way to knowing who to trust and where to look to determine if real problems exist or not.
Viruses are indeed really damned small, but not much else is true in this paragraph, which is mostly FUD. Nobody outside the ranks of medical conspiracy theorists doubts that the Ebola virus has been positively identified. We are about as certain of this are we are about the identity of, say, a tiger or an oak tree. Its genome has been completely sequenced many times. Yes, mutations have been found in viruses from the current epidemic that weren't found in previous outbreaks. There's nothing surprising about this - we see it every time the virus emerges from the animal reservoir and causes a new outbreak. There is no question of this being just some 'random crap' or anything to do with vaccinations. The mutations occur at specific positions within the well-defined sequence of the viral genome, and if you are so inclined you can go along to the UCSC genome website and see exactly where they are: http://genome.ucsc.edu/cgi-bin...
Sadly, this is more story dependency. It happens in the lab as well as out of it.
You can sequence and categorize all you like, and it is true that there are masses of recorded information accumulated in the study of viruses collected from animal and cell cultures. Excellent. But there is a rather large difference between that and knowing whatever it is specifically that is killing people in Africa, if it is just one organism, how the various mutations of it/them work. Pull a sample from a victim, and knowing what you are looking at is anything but a simple matter.
And on that point, has anybody actually isolated and sequenced a confirmed ebola sample from a human subject who died from that specific infection in the affected region?
Not to my knowledge. Maybe there's some breaking news I missed, but so far all I've seen are flaky claims and indeed, FUD.
To the extent which means all these 'confirmed cases' of ebola are pretty strange, as there are no tests that don't suffer from numerous inaccuracies and uncertainties.
That's what I'm talking about here, not the ordered universe inside the lab where the stories about how everything works and is under control line up nicely. -Which is not to say, "Don't study." I am saying that things are nowhere near as clearcut or simple as people would like to think.
I apologize if that sounds like FUD to you. Personally, I'd just call it "UD" because there is plenty of Uncertainty and plenty of Doubt at this stage of the game. The Fear part, however, is entirely optional, and I'd recommend against it, as it tends to lead to condescending little stories about reality; to make ourselves feel better and in control in an analog universe which actively defies digital categorization and control.
Indeed. You see, biological information is partitioned into units called "genes," which are responsible for individual functions. A "viral payload" consists of the entire viral genome, usually containing at least several thousand genes. Here, just one (or perhaps a few) viral genes have been selected because they code for proteins which the immune system can use to identify infected cells.
There is no danger in making a weakened cold virus (you simply invented the connection to bacteria) which contains these ebola-infected-cell-identifying genes. None of the genes which make ebola dangerous are present. The modified cold virus trains the immune system to kill cells which look like they have ebola. If ebola itself shows up later on, the vaccinated immune system is already prepared to identify and kill infected cells.
The more I learn about virology and immunology, the more I realize that what scientists are doing and what the public thinks they are doing exist in two very different realms.
The science is jargon-laden, complex and rests on certain assumptions which aren't even agreed upon by everybody. But the public, in order to satisfy their need to understand what is going on in this critical world of disease and medicine, build metaphoric stories, reducing the massive complexity and vaguenesses of what is going on at the microscopic level into simple story components.
These stories always sound pat and sensible and the solutions which exist within those story constructs similarly sound pat and sensible, because that's what stories are for. But they are just stories. Sci-fi/Fantasy.
People mistake the stories for reality. For instance:
"Here, just one (or perhaps a few) viral genes have been selected because they code for proteins which the immune system can use to identify infected cells.
There is no danger in making a weakened cold virus (you simply invented the connection to bacteria) which contains these ebola-infected-cell-identifying genes. None of the genes which make ebola dangerous are present."
Viruses are really damned small, and finding the right organism in an infected cell is anything but easy. Cells are full of all kinds of molecule-sized bits and pieces of shit. As of today, it is not even a certainty that the ebola virus has been positively identified, let alone properly categorized; there have been reports of over 250 mutation variants, any of which might be a mutated ebola virus, or maybe just another virus which might just have been present through the isolation process. Maybe just random bits of crap from a previous disease vector or vaccination injection. Nobody really knows for sure. It's pretty murky down there, and determining which organism causes what effects is a sloppy science, and it takes a huge amount of time and energy to even approximate answers.
So, deciding which genes from these samples of uncertain lineage are the ones which cause harm and which are simply present and useful for identification is by no means settled. We have best guesses right now. That's it.
The stories we tell ourselves sound great, and it makes us feel in control, but the reality is that there is still a lot we don't know.
Honestly, this inhaler ebola cure group sound more like they are using public relations tactics to fish for sponsorship. Whether they have a line on a real cure is doubtful.
Remember Chad? -Used to hang around the voting stations?
I think I liked him better than the PlayStation version of Democracy.
Then, there's always the Pencil. Low tech makes voting fraud more difficult. If we must have corrupt banksters running things, then at least we can ensure the spooks suffer from some carpel in their tunnels.
Well, the impulse behind the AGW racket was never to actually lower carbon emissions.
It has been pushed in order to certify in people's minds that humans, and specifically their leaders, are in control. -Even if that control is shoddy and destructive, at least it's in human hands.
The problem is that it's not.
We are at the mercy of unstable solar system mechanics. The Sun has been acting really weirdly over the last decade just as all of this screwed up weather has been reaching a fever pitch. Correlation doesn't always relate to causation. Except for when it does, which, if you think about it, is 100% of the time when you're looking at the correct indices.
Anyway, as to why we're seeing this big AGW push... History shows that when things get dicey, humans tend to panic and hang their leaders. So.., if our leaders can shift the blame for all the crazy weather onto the shoulders of the 99%, it is hoped that the standard "hang-'em!" response to these catastrophic Earth shake-ups might be avoided. Maybe delay the anger long enough for them to get down into their bunkers and lock the doors before the comets strike.
I'm not counting on it, though. Many Slashdotters are idiots. But others, as you say, are not buying the campaign.
Maybe when the programming is rebuffed in you enough times, you'll also take a fresh look at the story with all of its elements and piece together exactly how it works and realize you've been played. They play on our better natures, on our desire to do the right thing. These traits are excellent ones to have and they should not be discarded. But they do make us vulnerable, so we need a degree of caution in how we apply ourselves. We need to recognize how the game works and choose what role we are willing to play.
We cannot help anybody if we fail to discern truth from lies.
It's just another tool for attacking people at the University level; eroding confidence, teaching people to turn away from the development of their own instincts and senses of exploration. -To make people give up even trying to develop their own minds and souls and to instead turn toward authority figures for permission to think.
It's easy to point at idiots and psychopaths and say, "That could be YOU! For SHAME!"
Sorry, but there's a difference between Snakes and Monkeys. If you're a Monkey, it's okay to use your thumbs and your brains, it's okay to move forward with confidence even when you haven't got it 100% figured out. But that's okay. It's okay to make mistakes. It's nature's bio-feedback! It's how we Learn.
It's a tragedy that adults are so terrified of being wrong that they stop trying.
1. Visualize an outcome, *really* want it for long enough (and don't jinx it with anticipation), and it'll happen. It really works. -Though, you may not immediately recognize or remember that you asked for it, and you may not be happy with the reality of it when you arrive at its feet, but otherwise... You really do live in a mail order universe.
Meanwhile, paradoxically...
2. Wishful Thinking is Bad: Visualizing a desirable outcome while pretending that you can get there without having to work, without having to hone your skills or make difficult choices and without respecting or recognizing the obstacles along the path is a Bad Plan. Visualizing without Taking Care of Business is like wishing for a girlfriend and winding up with an abusive alcoholic partner and an STD. The Universe delivers but quality control is up to you.
3. Positive Thinking, (as I define it): Maintaining a working assumption that the Universe is an extremely awesome place where amazing things can and do happen if you put in the necessary work, stay aware of objective reality left and right, and react appropriately to challenges. -All while secretly knowing that Reality subtly favors those who are courageous, active and alert; the Creative Principle takes care of its own.
Words from a beloved authority figure come down revealing, (without even intending it to be a direct nudge), that many of his adoring flock lead lives dominated by of anti-creative thought patterns.
The bitter and begrudged ruffle of feathers in some of the posts here is telling.
He wasn't attacking you. Settle down. If you recognize yourself, then that calls for introspection, not defensiveness.
Have you ever been out in the real world, love? If you haven't, then don't give in to curiosity. It's not worth it. Also, if someone's chatting up current affairs with you, shut your ears when they mention ISIS.
Cute. But let me ask you this:
Which came first; the programming or the behavior?
It's a squishy line, but after years of observing this bullshit, I'd have to say that "Art Reflects Life" only if you're a poet or a 15 year-old with a sketchbook.
When you run billions of dollars through Hollywood movie houses, TV sets and video game screens, it's a whole different affair. Art Creates and Reinforces Behavior. That puts a lot of responsibility in the hands of media creators, doesn't it?
I'd much prefer media professionals to show a little back bone and not say, "How high?" when the CIA says "Jump!" -with their proxy stooges and make-believe press releases.
Or put (far) more simply: Marvel seems to manage to make fun films without resorting to pornographic violence.
They could just take all of their DC Animated Universe stories and convert them to live action. The writers for the DCAU seem to know how to grab a comic book audience. The DC live action movie writers don't want to make a fun comic book movie. They want to make a work of art based on a comic book series.
I'd go one further and say that the DC live action movie writers can't even make successful art pieces. Their work is too damned dark. The only exception I'll give them is the first Christian Bale Batman film. I couldn't even sit through the second two, and the latest Superman thing was a travesty. I really do NOT need to see dark Superman destroy cities, or the Joker slam a man eye-first onto a pencil. Seriously. That's not entertainment. That's sickness.
By contrast, Young Justice was one of the best animated shows I've ever seen, (writing-wise). Sure, it was for kids, but it was also smart and its heart was in the right place. It also wasn't scary and depressing. It was about people, not (failed) high concept bullshit.
It's not the property which limits a film; it's the creative staff, and yours has been crap for a long time now.
Also... I just watched the first episode of the Flash TV thing. Wow. That was terrible on every level. Here's a bit of advice: Characters are more important than Plot. That means you need to get good actors, and you need to give them time to develop on screen. It also means your writers need to have a lick or two of human insight.
I didn't even bother with "Gotham". The reviews told me everything I suspected. When even die-hard fans of the genre are dumping on you, complaining of stupid writing, you KNOW you've got a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Build a big computer and drop it into a 'body' it controls. Make it capable of responding in ways which can change its environment based on input from that same environment. Basic feedback loop.
Through outside forces, make sure the environment is always changing, so the computer never hits a point of equilibrium. Can never stop re-calculating and responding.
Now, build a second computer with the same specs. Put it into the same body as the first one, give it the same ability to control the body and respond to the environment. Wire them together somewhat so that they can take input from each other, but each is responding to a slightly different perspective on the environment around them. Never in total agreement.
Think of two mirrors facing each other. Sort of. And then...
Magic!
Self awareness occurs somewhere in the space between those two computers.
Also, note how the human brain is divided into two halves.
Now go and spend the next hour puzzling over that. Have fun!
Been on this diet for a couple of years now. Works great. I feel awesome and I look awesome, and it doesn't take any real effort. (Though, you have to give blood to keep your iron down, take your magnesium and keep your vitamin C levels up). But if you DO a little training.., wow! Super hero muscles for nothing.
I don't buy the, "Oh, this time next decade, they'll be telling you the exact opposite!" apathetic complaints. People last decade were fat and unhealthy and heart disease was a problem. All the vegetarians I know are either too skinny and malnourished or fat and grey, and all of them are suffering from the brain fog of early onset dementia. God love 'em for their ethics, but honestly! I'd rather kill a cow than have a heart attack at 55. Sorry. I do promise to kill it nicely.
There is a fundamental truth which reality orbits around regardless of what you happen to believe or what the science magazines say. They may tell us the opposite next year, but they'll be wrong at best, and liars at worst.
Ye Olde Science Magazines are no better than religious pamphlets these days, so I'm going to go ahead and trust logic, my own research, community information sharing initiatives and my own five senses on this one, thanks.
I'm sick of trusting authority-based science when they tell me I'm the victim of magic show antics and that my senses are unreliable; that I can only trust my leaders. Fuck that! I know I'm not infallible, but I'm also pretty smart; I'm not a slave to my ego, scared to be wrong. I know how to correct for errors once I detect them. -Like if my gut started expanding and my heart started feeling fluttery and if my skin wasn't glowing with health on this high fat diet, I'd stop and go back to eating wheat and sugar. I don't need some fool in a government lab coat or some pill-salesman to tell me what to think.
I'm just amazed that acceptance of high fat/low carb diets is taking hold. The fact that something works usually means people are running in the opposite direction.
It makes me wonder if perhaps there isn't something worse we're missing which makes the optimal health we're learning to enjoy invalid; what could make lots of strong and healthy people a non-threat to the power establishment I wonder..?
I could only hazard guesses as to what sort of bomb and detonation technology is available to the black operations world, but I *very* much doubt it would be limited by such elementary concerns. This isn't the 1950's. Just using the stone-age technology available to regular Walmart shoppers, a bomb maker would have access to things like GPS technology. But this is a really silly debate. And we don't actually know if it would have had to have been in the cockpit. Ukraine is only just now allowing proper inspection of the crash debris, and what evidence there may be is going to be hopelessly polluted at this point. We have very little to go on, and the chances are we are simply not going to get any hard official evidence as to what really happened.
Yes I have. And no they wouldn't.
I'm not going to retread old ground by repeating myself; I've provided enough insight for you to go on at this point. Whether you take it into consideration is up to you. I will leave you with this, however:
Israel has survived so far because it has become expert in manipulating social and political fabrics so that it doesn't matter if it gets caught. They have been caught. Look at the numerous things Israel, or to be more accurate, the Zionist elements within Israel, (wouldn't want to implicate decent people just living there), have pulled and we know they've pulled.
They destroyed a U.S. navel vessel, (the USS Liberty), built a not-so-secret nuclear arsenal that everybody knew about while they were building it, and erected an actual *wall* around a captive population which they enact atrocities upon with impunity. -The latest ground assault which began on the same day as the downing of the passenger jet in question has killed over 2000 civilians, women and children, non-combatants.
Israel has already been 'caught' many times and it has not spelled the "end of Israel", nor will it.
Outing a spy operation isn't going to happen because even smoking gun evidence would not be good enough; too many people are devoted to not seeing. It's the word of conspiracy theorists against the mainstream media and Zionist-aligned politicians in Washington.
-I described conditioning and blackmail before, (which you seem to have ignored), but I did not mention the whole religious angle. The Christian ruling class *needs* Israel intact for their belief system to work.
Added all together, there was very simply never any significant risk of Israel being outed on this operation in any way that matters. The people who know, already know and they are heavily invested in not doing anything about it.
Except for the fact that it appears to have paid off with zero blow-back. Again.
Which suggests that your risk assessment isn't an accurate representation of the real situation.
Your clear-cut IF/THEN reasoning is not in and of itself at fault. However, (and I've pointed this out already), it stems from an 'official' reality where much of the relevant detail remains out of view. You cannot extrapolate accurately using faulty and missing base assumptions.
For instance... why do you assume a time bomb? Are there no other ways to detonate a device accurately?
That same over-simple thinking is evident in your understanding of politics. -And please, I am not trying to hurt you with insults. Ignorance is not a crime. That is not my intention in explaining this stuff. -Israel has provided a countless number of affronts, each worthy of universal embargo, and yet the UN security council has done nothing more than offer toothless condemnation, year after year. There are many reasons for this which you are not be taking into account.
The villains get away with this kind of thing regularly, (though, taking down a passenger jet is on the more ostentatious end of the spectrum). But overall, it's really nothing new, and the current system has been groomed to just roll with it. There really wasn't much of a risk of discovery because people don't *want* to discover that which would complicate the official narrative.
Consider some of the forces which are at play but which you have not included in your calculations...
1. Pre-established conditioning. Just look at how hard you are yourself fighting to reject the idea of Israeli involvement. Why? It's not because "Time bombs wouldn't work"; that was a rapidly devised invention introduced to make the unwanted idea go away; it wasn't even a concept beforehand. So.., why not Israel? And further, why seek a "why not Israel" at all? What is your motivation? It's just an idea, and one nobody would have even brought up if it didn't fit the events and the pre-existing pattern. Why does it automatically offend you and others? And how could such an automatic rejection be useful?
2. People in power have their dark secrets, many of them related to child sex rings which penetrate to high levels of global leadership. There are numerous reasons for this, and it is promoted and controlled; a way of criminals keeping each other's secrets safe and everybody under control. The Mossad has had its hands in this pie for a long time, likely because it is such a good way to control the official message. If you introduce that element to your risk assessment, how does that change things?
Those are just two elements, they are very real, (explore them rather than look for more broken time bombs to make the ugliness of it go away). There are numerous other elements at play which one needs to understand in order for reality to make sense.
-And also, bearing in mind that the bomb is just a theory.
It appears that there was indeed evidence of what looks like gunfire aimed at the cockpit. But we don't know anything for certain; all we can do is look at the influences known to exist and extrapolate. At this point, the most reasonable extrapolations based on known evidence and previously reduced extrapolations, puts the possibility of a deliberate Russian BUK missile attack deep into the zone of high improbability.
That's a logical distillation, granted. However, it is based on some critical over-simplications and assumptions which are not accurate wrt how the black world operates. The reality is rather more complicated (and interesting) in terms of what actually happened, what was reported, and the players who had influence on the outcome.
I'm afraid I don't have the time or energy to offer right now to explain it all at length, but here's one of the better reduxes of the whole scenario:
http://www.sott.net/article/28...
Give that a read-through and see what you think.
Why?
From the experiential pov of the person who cannot afford a $20 chocolate bar, the linear extrapolation is a perfectly valid means of explaining why he isn't going to be eating chocolate that day.
Market forces are real, sure, but they are over-used by the upper class as a means of pooh-poohing responsible resource management and the concerns of those who occupy economically vulnerable positions beneath them. Externalizing problems and reveling in base Greed are apparently more fun than thinking of others.
Right now, virtually all cocoa is harvested on the sweat and blood of unpaid child slaves. Non-linear market force philosophy isn't helping them any.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Oy vey.
You appear to have posted before reading my other response to this very valid question...
(Also, you're rude and kind of crazy-sounding in your over-reaction.) I apologize to anybody just tuning in to this exchange for my blowing this trumpet more than once; I wouldn't have to if these gentlemen would just settle down and stop tunnel-visioning and calling names...
So...
On the day when the airliner was attacked, Israel launched a major ground offensive into Gaza. It's first in just over five years.
Now I don't know about sane, but if perhaps I were an Israeli war minister, I might take the precaution of tasking my spy network with setting up some kind of powerful distraction elsewhere in the world (like the crashing of a passenger plane on a hot border) to cause enough shock and awe that my rolling tanks and troops into the walled ghetto to bomb, shoot and terrorize an unarmed, starving, civilian population (who it is common knowledge, I truly, truly wish to see exterminated).., that such an unabashed war crime might be overlooked by the rest of the world, reeling as they will be with the horror and drama of a plane crash and hysterical nonsense about Russian missiles.
This tactic has a long and august history. But like I said, I've already explained it once already. I hope I don't have to do it again.
http://politics.slashdot.org/c...
Just out of curiosity, what would Mossad have to gain from something like this? I could see them trying to give Al Queda or ISIL some bad press, but what would they have to gain from making Ukraine look bad?
That's a fair question.
On the morning when the airliner was attacked, world attention zeroed in on that event and failed to react to the Israeli ground offensive launched into Gaza.
That's the micro. On the macro side, fanning war flames between the East and West will result in a lot of dangerous oil politics which generally sees the oppression of Israel's historic enemies.
When one charts the major offenses launched by Israel which have had the potential to raise the ire of the world, or when peace talks threaten to lead to real concessions, there has *always* been some kind of outrageous attack which galvanizes public attention on something other than the issue at hand. Then a few weeks later, when the world regains its senses, too much time has passed and everybody has forgotten what Israel has done.
Business as usual. Basically, Israel has better spycraft than the rest of us. (Of course, saying so is "anti-semitic"! Which is just another example of practical counter-intelligence.)
I'd put together a fake image which looks good enough to pass the sniff test for a day or two, but which is designed to "go off" shortly after when the public gets a chance to deconstruct it.
The results: "Ha! We, the West, have caught you red-handed, and we solved this problem ourselves, so we OWN the discovery! Now the belief that you are a sneaky and tricky enemy is connected to our feelings of self-worth, because we shall remind you, WE the public caught you red-handed because we are clever and discerning! Ha and Fie, I say, you blackguards!" (etc.)"
Seriously. Are the Russian secret services really SO bad at their job, that they didn't know exactly what the fallout would be upon releasing such a poor fake?
I'll answer that rhetorical for you: No. No, they're not. Their job is subversion and craftiness and they're really damned good at it, and they bloody well would not be so stupid as to not realize how such a photo would backfire.
But somebody did. In fact, somebody knew exactly what the fallout would be and they planned for it.
If anything is "obvious" here, it is that this is the propaganda equivalent of a False Flag attack.
My guess is CIA/Mossad.
Russia is only the enemy if you happen to be a Western/European Elitist 1%er trying to hold on to your pile of ill-gotten gains and legions of serfs.
Make sure the people are looking outward for an external enemy rather than at the psychopaths in power right here at home.
I think it's interesting, judging from the responses here, how many people are still carrying around deep wounds from grade school and junior high.
I don't say that with aspersion. Everybody is deeply affected by our childhood experiences. But I do think that until one can put these old wounds to rest, it's pretty much guaranteed that we will also be operating under just as thick a layer of automatic programming as Mrs. Sampson was, and maybe not even that different a variety.
I wonder what would happen if some smarmy kid came to you with rock-solid evidence that 2nd person perspective stories really were shitty?
Any programming which jumps in and acts out behaviors for us before we can rationally think about whether or not they're good for us, is worthy of review.
A question without judgment for you: Why not look at Mrs. Sampson as what she really was; a most-likely unremarkable middle-aged woman whose job it was to lead a roomful of young teens through a day of lessons and not lose her soul in the process? You were probably smarter than she was, if not more experienced. But if you never knew her, you'd probably also help her pick up her groceries if you saw her spill them in the parking lot.
The bigger question I have and which drives me: Why do we set up the education system the way we do? It seriously messes people up for life, installing all kinds of traumas and personality ticks which get in the way of personal development for nearly ever.
It's a worse problem, this installing idiotic 'safety' systems, than simply wasting money. (Or opportunistic companies trading on fear for their bread and butter.)
It raises the anxiety level, the hystericisation of a population. It's a way of telling kids and their families that the Threat Is Real! -Can you imagine going to a school every day knowing that there is a Real Danger of being shot that the adults are taking seriously enough to install monitoring systems?
The point of all these shootings is keep people in a traumatized state where rational thinking becomes increasingly difficult to the point where it's just easier to let the authorities do your thinking for you. -And yeah, I'm the guy who thinks that there is some dark side social engineering going on.
Glad you survived it.
I had a difficult time in school as well.
Kids are targeted who have the potential to change the world later on for the better. The dark side kids, and they are; it makes for an intriguing study to learn what those kids went on to do with the rest of their lives. I've found that they tend to become parts of the 'evil' support structure. And as kids, they know their path and purpose on a soul level; to destroy and feed and hope like hell (and spend nearly every active moment working to ensure) nobody singles them out for their own medicine. Make sure you have the right shoes and shift that spotlight of 'mean' to the next chicken down the pecking order.
If you are resonating on a different vibe, they naturally pick up on it and you are seen as the natural enemy. It's not magic. You know who the assholes in the room are when you spend enough time with them, and the reverse is true.
Even small butterflies count, so if they are quashed early on, the dark side wins a battle.
So, I'm glad you survived!
I hope you have also honed your social-fu and managed to not hate anybody. When the good kids grow up and get their act together, they can be ridiculously formidable. The dark-siders just decay over time, so they really do have to strike their enemies early, while their targets are still small and vulnerable.
You said it!
It's almost as if the psychopaths who lead the human race are retarded assholes more interested in profiting from dumb violence which drags the creative principle down into the mud (and rapes it) rather than from doing things that are hard and exploratory and which propel human awareness and knowledge upwards.
Because, really, when we consider it, you can transfer just as much wealth from the public pocket to the private pocket by investing in space. It could STILL be a huge tax-skimming scam. And yet, it's just not good enough for the psychopath.
So it's got less to do with money, and more to do with an innate desire to defile the Creation.
I guess you can't defile as much when you're flying up to meet the universe in person than you can by being down in the mud murdering its children.
JFK pushed the space program forward. He wasn't killed for this reason, or any other single thing. Those animals killed him simply because he was Good.
It's a big country, and I'm sure there has to be some variance between values among people when you have a billion to choose from.
But...
Color me racist. No, please do. I really, really am.
India is a country where unwanted children are dumped like trash into the streets, corruption is considered normal and the atmosphere of hyper-competitiveness seems to push everybody's brain into a crazed kind of fight or flight mode which hampers every other human circuit. I can't be around Indian culture without wanting to hide under furniture to escape the crazy.
Wait. Hold on. This just in: Not racist, per se. Because, interestingly, people who are only one generation removed from that seething land mass are entirely capable of developing into excellent, entirely likable people who aren't completely batshit insane. So it's not genetic vile stupidity. It's cultural vile stupidity. Probably a lot like the heavy crime areas in the U.S. -Pull babies out of those places and raise them in bullet-free zones where people treat each other with dignity and love, and I'm sure you'll get fine, undamaged people that way also.
So, really, I don't care what genetic material you start with, if you force people to endure pressure-cooker lives of massive over-population limited resources and shitty infrastructure, combined with the momentum of hundreds of sustained years of dog-eat-dog corruption, you're going to end up with nothing but vast yields of psychologically damaged people.
India is a problem I don't know how to solve without basically wiping it clean of humans and starting again.
Maybe just the cities.
Folks in the rural areas sound less insane from the traveler's reports I've heard.
I bow to your superior knowledge! (Not being sarcastic.)
Thanks for sharing.
If I might bother you with a further question which has been on my mind, as I'm still trying to figure out what my own stance is on all of this. The information is, I am finding, really hard to nail down:
I've been unable to find any information about *how* these viruses are isolated and identified; the process and systems. All anybody ever seems to repeat are these cartoon-level bits of media copy, "Samples must be sent to a lab for verification" -where, apparently through some sort of black-box method, they are "verified". The same sentences are used over and over in every news release, saying essentially nothing. When I try to search-engine my way more deeply into the subject, I find little beyond this avalanche of noise.
The best I could locate was a user's maintenance manual .pdf for some sort of field deployable machine which I think might have been designed to perform a kind of electrical wave form analysis on wet samples, but it was altogether opaque, written for a select customer base who already know what they're doing.
Essentially, I want to know how it works, where it is reliable and where it is not, what gaps in the process exist, or if it is actually working at the Star Trek level. -Those gene charts you linked to; are they what they say they are and how can one know? Is there any spin? Any desire to accommodate funding sources with biases?
There's just too much I don't know about this, and I find I've been made hyper-sensitive due to stories about corruption in the scientific and medical communities and industry. We have little choice but to trust a process which is opaque, and where human nature offers plenty of reason to want to be extremely cautious. "Caveat Emptor", but how can one beware when un-polished knowledge is so hard to come by and so difficult to understand raw?
Knowing how it works would go a long damned way to knowing who to trust and where to look to determine if real problems exist or not.
Sadly, this is more story dependency. It happens in the lab as well as out of it.
You can sequence and categorize all you like, and it is true that there are masses of recorded information accumulated in the study of viruses collected from animal and cell cultures. Excellent. But there is a rather large difference between that and knowing whatever it is specifically that is killing people in Africa, if it is just one organism, how the various mutations of it/them work. Pull a sample from a victim, and knowing what you are looking at is anything but a simple matter.
And on that point, has anybody actually isolated and sequenced a confirmed ebola sample from a human subject who died from that specific infection in the affected region?
Not to my knowledge. Maybe there's some breaking news I missed, but so far all I've seen are flaky claims and indeed, FUD.
To the extent which means all these 'confirmed cases' of ebola are pretty strange, as there are no tests that don't suffer from numerous inaccuracies and uncertainties.
That's what I'm talking about here, not the ordered universe inside the lab where the stories about how everything works and is under control line up nicely. -Which is not to say, "Don't study." I am saying that things are nowhere near as clearcut or simple as people would like to think.
I apologize if that sounds like FUD to you. Personally, I'd just call it "UD" because there is plenty of Uncertainty and plenty of Doubt at this stage of the game. The Fear part, however, is entirely optional, and I'd recommend against it, as it tends to lead to condescending little stories about reality; to make ourselves feel better and in control in an analog universe which actively defies digital categorization and control.
The more I learn about virology and immunology, the more I realize that what scientists are doing and what the public thinks they are doing exist in two very different realms.
The science is jargon-laden, complex and rests on certain assumptions which aren't even agreed upon by everybody. But the public, in order to satisfy their need to understand what is going on in this critical world of disease and medicine, build metaphoric stories, reducing the massive complexity and vaguenesses of what is going on at the microscopic level into simple story components.
These stories always sound pat and sensible and the solutions which exist within those story constructs similarly sound pat and sensible, because that's what stories are for. But they are just stories. Sci-fi/Fantasy.
People mistake the stories for reality. For instance:
Viruses are really damned small, and finding the right organism in an infected cell is anything but easy. Cells are full of all kinds of molecule-sized bits and pieces of shit. As of today, it is not even a certainty that the ebola virus has been positively identified, let alone properly categorized; there have been reports of over 250 mutation variants, any of which might be a mutated ebola virus, or maybe just another virus which might just have been present through the isolation process. Maybe just random bits of crap from a previous disease vector or vaccination injection. Nobody really knows for sure. It's pretty murky down there, and determining which organism causes what effects is a sloppy science, and it takes a huge amount of time and energy to even approximate answers.
So, deciding which genes from these samples of uncertain lineage are the ones which cause harm and which are simply present and useful for identification is by no means settled. We have best guesses right now. That's it.
The stories we tell ourselves sound great, and it makes us feel in control, but the reality is that there is still a lot we don't know.
Honestly, this inhaler ebola cure group sound more like they are using public relations tactics to fish for sponsorship. Whether they have a line on a real cure is doubtful.
Remember Chad? -Used to hang around the voting stations?
I think I liked him better than the PlayStation version of Democracy.
Then, there's always the Pencil. Low tech makes voting fraud more difficult. If we must have corrupt banksters running things, then at least we can ensure the spooks suffer from some carpel in their tunnels.
Well, the impulse behind the AGW racket was never to actually lower carbon emissions.
It has been pushed in order to certify in people's minds that humans, and specifically their leaders, are in control. -Even if that control is shoddy and destructive, at least it's in human hands.
The problem is that it's not.
We are at the mercy of unstable solar system mechanics. The Sun has been acting really weirdly over the last decade just as all of this screwed up weather has been reaching a fever pitch. Correlation doesn't always relate to causation. Except for when it does, which, if you think about it, is 100% of the time when you're looking at the correct indices.
Anyway, as to why we're seeing this big AGW push... History shows that when things get dicey, humans tend to panic and hang their leaders. So.., if our leaders can shift the blame for all the crazy weather onto the shoulders of the 99%, it is hoped that the standard "hang-'em!" response to these catastrophic Earth shake-ups might be avoided. Maybe delay the anger long enough for them to get down into their bunkers and lock the doors before the comets strike.
I'm not counting on it, though. Many Slashdotters are idiots. But others, as you say, are not buying the campaign.
Maybe when the programming is rebuffed in you enough times, you'll also take a fresh look at the story with all of its elements and piece together exactly how it works and realize you've been played. They play on our better natures, on our desire to do the right thing. These traits are excellent ones to have and they should not be discarded. But they do make us vulnerable, so we need a degree of caution in how we apply ourselves. We need to recognize how the game works and choose what role we are willing to play.
We cannot help anybody if we fail to discern truth from lies.
Ugh. I don't buy the DK effect.
It's just another tool for attacking people at the University level; eroding confidence, teaching people to turn away from the development of their own instincts and senses of exploration. -To make people give up even trying to develop their own minds and souls and to instead turn toward authority figures for permission to think.
It's easy to point at idiots and psychopaths and say, "That could be YOU! For SHAME!"
Sorry, but there's a difference between Snakes and Monkeys. If you're a Monkey, it's okay to use your thumbs and your brains, it's okay to move forward with confidence even when you haven't got it 100% figured out. But that's okay. It's okay to make mistakes. It's nature's bio-feedback! It's how we Learn.
It's a tragedy that adults are so terrified of being wrong that they stop trying.
The Three Rules of Life:
1. Visualize an outcome, *really* want it for long enough (and don't jinx it with anticipation), and it'll happen. It really works. -Though, you may not immediately recognize or remember that you asked for it, and you may not be happy with the reality of it when you arrive at its feet, but otherwise... You really do live in a mail order universe.
Meanwhile, paradoxically...
2. Wishful Thinking is Bad: Visualizing a desirable outcome while pretending that you can get there without having to work, without having to hone your skills or make difficult choices and without respecting or recognizing the obstacles along the path is a Bad Plan. Visualizing without Taking Care of Business is like wishing for a girlfriend and winding up with an abusive alcoholic partner and an STD. The Universe delivers but quality control is up to you.
3. Positive Thinking, (as I define it): Maintaining a working assumption that the Universe is an extremely awesome place where amazing things can and do happen if you put in the necessary work, stay aware of objective reality left and right, and react appropriately to challenges. -All while secretly knowing that Reality subtly favors those who are courageous, active and alert; the Creative Principle takes care of its own.
Words from a beloved authority figure come down revealing, (without even intending it to be a direct nudge), that many of his adoring flock lead lives dominated by of anti-creative thought patterns.
The bitter and begrudged ruffle of feathers in some of the posts here is telling.
He wasn't attacking you. Settle down. If you recognize yourself, then that calls for introspection, not defensiveness.
Cute. But let me ask you this:
Which came first; the programming or the behavior?
It's a squishy line, but after years of observing this bullshit, I'd have to say that "Art Reflects Life" only if you're a poet or a 15 year-old with a sketchbook.
When you run billions of dollars through Hollywood movie houses, TV sets and video game screens, it's a whole different affair. Art Creates and Reinforces Behavior. That puts a lot of responsibility in the hands of media creators, doesn't it?
I'd much prefer media professionals to show a little back bone and not say, "How high?" when the CIA says "Jump!" -with their proxy stooges and make-believe press releases.
Or put (far) more simply: Marvel seems to manage to make fun films without resorting to pornographic violence.
I'd go one further and say that the DC live action movie writers can't even make successful art pieces. Their work is too damned dark. The only exception I'll give them is the first Christian Bale Batman film. I couldn't even sit through the second two, and the latest Superman thing was a travesty. I really do NOT need to see dark Superman destroy cities, or the Joker slam a man eye-first onto a pencil. Seriously. That's not entertainment. That's sickness.
By contrast, Young Justice was one of the best animated shows I've ever seen, (writing-wise). Sure, it was for kids, but it was also smart and its heart was in the right place. It also wasn't scary and depressing. It was about people, not (failed) high concept bullshit.
It's not the property which limits a film; it's the creative staff, and yours has been crap for a long time now.
Also... I just watched the first episode of the Flash TV thing. Wow. That was terrible on every level. Here's a bit of advice: Characters are more important than Plot. That means you need to get good actors, and you need to give them time to develop on screen. It also means your writers need to have a lick or two of human insight.
I didn't even bother with "Gotham". The reviews told me everything I suspected. When even die-hard fans of the genre are dumping on you, complaining of stupid writing, you KNOW you've got a problem.
ISIS is without question a proxy created to provide an excuse to pursue the on-going agenda of strategic land/oil grabs.
And any chem weapons they end up using will have been provided by us or our allies. Count on it.