I am beginning to think that we are being subjected to total propaganda. The US public may be almost in a state of mind control by continuous misinformation.
You can get a glimpse of this by the way your local news is reported. You have your local Sally Sunshine who greats you with happy, friendly tones and the delivers the greatest pile of nonsense one can imagine. The audience is felt to be in need of comfort and confrontation or disturbing news is suppressed every day. You see a similar tactic with organisations that are subject to the good will of the community. For example a church may give a free meal to the poor one night a week. When this is done many of the poor or homeless will walk or bicycle quite a distance for the meal. But when you see what is served and the caloric intake of the meal vs. the energy needed to get to the church the actual effect may be to increase the level of starvation. The image of the church is enhanced and I do understand the money issues involved but in the end the food programs at the church may be negative.
At a more drastic scale we see California in urgent emergency over lack of water and forest fires. Yet you will not see news reports on what can actually be done to stop the growing emergency. For example freezing building permits should lower the demand for water as growing populations demand more water. Building many new lakes and reservoirs could help with fire control and water supply issues as well. Yet we see no news about such topics at all. And on a nation wide basis we see no mention of the notion that population growth increases all of our negative trends such as lack of water, low paying jobs, poverty, addictions, crime and mental illness are all increased by swelling populations.
I am glad that someone is thinking about disaster aid but the most neglected problem is the potential for a severe hurricane in highly crowded areas. South Florida can not be evacuated. We have at least 4 million people and very few highways as a way out. After a storm getting food and water and medical supplies into south Florida is not always possible. Imagine the storage required to feed this large population and the equipment it takes to get food out to the people. Trees cover the streets for days. All power and communications vanish. Safe water is not available nor will sewage systems tend to work. Injured people often have to wait days to be moved to an ER. Areas like Miami can easily be hit much harder than Katrina hit New Orleans. In my town we lost every grocery store nine years ago. those huge flat roofs on grocery stores collapse and the food gets wet and the perishables have no cooling as the power vanishes. We could easily have a million or more people in dire condition after a storm. So we do need several huge storage areas around our state as well as portable hospitals and all kinds of rescue vehicles and food delivery systems ready to go into action at a moments notice. The length of our state is such that we need these massive preparations running the length of the state so that no area is more than two hours away from the stockpiles. Lack of central planning and permitting random growth has created a very deadly trap which nature will spring one day.
I am of the opinion that if the typical person is hit by lightening and we add up the liabilities and assets that we will find most people are worth less than zero. Outstanding mortgages, car loans and other loans are only part of the issue. the cost of dying and the costs of burials as well as the cost of settling estates add to the issue but then there are a pile of other issues. The support of your kids, their education, your widow's needs all are considerations. So when you sell off the house and the car and everything else you can bet that it is rare to have enough life insurance to cover it all. Got three teens? How about college for them? Does your pension die with you or does it stay alive for your widow?
As a nation America can not afford itself. As individuals we can not afford ourselves and the exceptions are sort of rare.
The contamination from a reactor spill might be so serious that one spill in ten thousand years might not be an acceptable risk. There is also a problem in that giving one nation the permission to build reactors really gives any regime the right to do the same. And we have no control over the safety or design standards applied in other nations. Nations like Iran and N. Korea act like mental patients who failed to take their meds. I'm not certain these nations should be allowed to chew gum much less have anything to do with nuclear power.
I suspect that a wiser society would have a bunch of transformers built and in storage. These days it is not only solar storms that might wreck us. The military apparently has E bombs that wipe out electronics as well as power lies. That means that an enemy will probably also have e bombs at its disposal. One unit is a miniature designed to be used in cop cars that can be aimed at a car that refuses to stop and hit it with a focused wave of power that destroys the cars electronics and brings it to a stop. The device works and hes been demonstrated but needs more work to make it convenient to install in squad cars.
Some people turn of thought when in a fight. It can be a learned talent and it makes ones response much faster and blows delivered much more accurate. The catch is that when in that state extra violence can be delivered as the person is on auto pilot. Courts have not dealt with this as so few people who do this can verbalize what was going on. I'm not so certain that the true capacity to form intent exists in a person in that state of mind. Even advanced chess players can get into a similar state in which they can calculate chess moves like a machine but are sort of not human for a bit after the game is over. A portion of their minds has been diverted elsewhere and it makes them sort of silly emotionally.
The US government needs a strict law that disallows any aid of any kind or financial contacts with nations that use torture. No imports and no exports and no military or humanitarian aid as well as clauses that disallow work arounds by hiring a third party to deal with these nations. For example if either Israel or Palestine tortures just one person we would be required to hold them in total isolation regardless of any consequences. Nations such as we have seen in S. America that use torture through private contractors or commit crimes against humanity would also suffer severe and long lasting isolation. I mean right down to cutting the phone lines and telling them we will check back with them in 30 years to see if they are ready to associate with real human beings again.
At a time in at which criminals felt that cell phones were safe to use in committing their crime planning it caused a lot of them to end up in prison. As it became more apparent that cell phones were being used to catch criminals they switched tactics.
So now we may have drones that are quite small and can plant a microphone in the plants near a porch where people are thought to be conspiring to commit crimes or organize terror attacks. Would you want them to really believe that such a technology could be applied to them at this time or perhaps let them think that such a technology is so expensive and rare that only much more important criminals were being watched?
Nobody wants the government swimming in their soup bowl but on the other hand we may depend upon that type of law enforcement more than we know. It is not a simple issue and even beyond the Constitution is the fact that the government has a duty to persist over time to keep that constitution alive as well as the american people.
Things are out of balance. We have a Central Intelligence Agency but we do not have a Central Stupidity Agency. Until we do the House of representatives is taking the role and we have people or lizards like Donald Rumsfield and the right wing to help keep our nation well influenced by total stupidity.
Have you seen film of the houses in Florida falling into sink holes? That is what happens when you suck too much water out of an aquifer. When the underground maze of tunnels is filled with water the land above is stable. But when the water level drops and the caverns have air pockets the caves collapse and everything above comes tumbling down quite suddenly. We had one fellows home split in half and he perished when his bed fell into the pit. They could not even retrieve his body so he is now part of our drinking water. Ah, the special tang of a fermented corpse in the water fountain makes a trip to Orlando so interesting and it hasn't harmed Mickey Mouse one bit.
What usually happens is that the well water starts getting nasty and the well must be drilled a bit deeper to get decent water. There are places out west where good water used to be had at 200 ft. and now the wells have been extended down to 450 ft.. The energy used to lift that water gets more and more expensive.
The higher the prices of food items the more restricted the items are in the shopping cart and not just in size but in quality and variety, Corporate food production is not working out for the public at all.
I am in one of the numerous areas that has a problem with wild hogs, I am able to buy a whole hog, butchered and ready to cook, at a very low price. The shocker is that the wild hogs taste a lot better than commercial pork. They do not have bacon as the bellies are lean but the quality of the meat is superior. We have no choice but to have hunters collect the wild hogs as they are rather dangerous and can do amazing things to a lawn in just a few minutes of foraging. I am hoping that the wild hogs will be able to eat a few of the pythons that are too common in Florida now and conversely if a python eats a hog that means a pet or somebodies kid will not vanish.
These communities need to shout growth, growth, growth and issue oodles of new business and housing permits. That way these dummies will die from lack of water and stop their economic madness. Oh! And they need to make oodles and oodles of babies also. After all, growth is their god.
Asking customers or others to leave a business has put way too much power in the hands of people unable to handle it. Situations like this deserve a court hearing. At times it may even be in opposition to the Americans With Disabilities Act. For example a stroke victim or a person suffering a mental condition may exhibit unpopular behaviors as a direct consequence of their condition just a Turret's syndrome might cause cursing or obscene utterances. Businesses as well as individuals have to suffer the effects just as the person who bears the illness suffers the effects. Depending upon who is doing the looking even drunken or drug induced behaviors may be a disability. We can not have a pretense that the behavior of an ill person is somehow not part of that person as control is often beyond any abilities that they may have to resist the behaviors. As long as they are non violent I can't see any business denying them access.
There are numerous reasons for people needing glasses that can not currently be helped by laser eye surgery. It obviously works quite well for many other peoples' conditions.
The US has been accused of using Great Britain as a spy agency and having that information sent back to the US and most likely in a reciprocal arrangement. This may predate the current terror issues.
What we are seeing is a military that can not fight against a non army type of violent aggression. Therefore intelligence becomes vital as a method of victory over terrorists.
This is one of those issues without a good solution. Yes, the level of spying on people by government is dangerous. But failing to do that spying may be even more dangerous. Civilians are caught in the middle and have no access to information that we would need to make any kind of intelligent vote or utter much of an opinion.
The US and most other nations have signed the UN bill of rights. If we attach penalties for violation of the UN bill of rights governments would be forced to hold a much higher standard of behavior.
Oddly the terrorists are lucky that we are using covert means to fight them. The only other option might be to eliminate them which probably would mean nuclear responses on their cities. If pressed hard enough we have no other effective options than simply bombing them out of existence along with the many millions of innocents who would perish.
Obviously we don't want to be a culture all about draconian punishments that last forever. But that presents a real conflict. Suppose for a brief moment that you have a slot for one honors student in a scholarship situation that holds great promise for an applicant. You have two of the most perfect applicants that you will ever see and both have wonderful credentials that are far above any reasonable expectations for any student. Yet one student had a minor arrest for being drunk while in the ninth grade. Isn't it fair to take the student with the perfect record? And what does it say about us if we allow a situation in which the less than perfect sometimes do better than those who are unblemished in any way?
The problem is that we have very few people with stellar accomplishments and perfect social histories and they deserve the highest rewards whereas we have all kinds of people that have had a serious problem or two along the way who also may have great talents. Shouldn't we always strive to help the best the most?
This line of though usually gets me some hate mail.
There is simply no easy solution for the border issue. No matter what is done or not done human suffering will take place. Families are split apart. Nations must have borders or the nation ceases to exist. America has never had a working economic system that provides justice for workers, owners, and those unable to be either. Yet, even if we have a border guard stop an immigrant one foot shy of entry it may be a death sentence for the immigrant. With 75 miles of desert behind them and all kinds of hazards to turn someone back may be murder and that someone could include infants or elders.
A strong nation ID card would help such that even casual employment was not possible without prior approval by local police would go a long way towards stopping illegals from having the desire to get here. Yet businesses love lowering the wage pool by flooding illegal immigrants into the nation. I wonder just how much the price of groceries would jump if illegal farm labor was shut down.
And the absolute bottom line is that reproduction as well as immigration degrades the quality of life for all of us. We need strict population size control.
OK, so they seek to find collisions . But there may be endless forms of universes that are incapable of collisions or having any transfer of information or energy between each other. Perhaps thoughts can create a universe that springs into existence in a sort of absolute elsewhere and continues on its own path.
Providing jobs means absolutely nothing nor does the profit of business. Anything that does harm to the land or oceans should be a felony. People come and go. The land and the oceans must exist for all people in all generations. Our needs are simply not a consideration. The horror of anything in the Arctic or extreme north is even worse as when accidents occur we have no ability to restore or mitigate a disaster.
Without considering the potential need for regulation the first question is whether any effective regulations can be put in place. Getting all nations and perhaps all individuals to follow a rule or law is next to impossible. Can an individual make such a genetic alteration? How could we prevent that? Could it be weaponized by a lunatic government such as N. Korea?
Slashdot Mirror
I am beginning to think that we are being subjected to total propaganda. The US public may be almost in a state of mind control by continuous misinformation. You can get a glimpse of this by the way your local news is reported. You have your local Sally Sunshine who greats you with happy, friendly tones and the delivers the greatest pile of nonsense one can imagine. The audience is felt to be in need of comfort and confrontation or disturbing news is suppressed every day. You see a similar tactic with organisations that are subject to the good will of the community. For example a church may give a free meal to the poor one night a week. When this is done many of the poor or homeless will walk or bicycle quite a distance for the meal. But when you see what is served and the caloric intake of the meal vs. the energy needed to get to the church the actual effect may be to increase the level of starvation. The image of the church is enhanced and I do understand the money issues involved but in the end the food programs at the church may be negative. At a more drastic scale we see California in urgent emergency over lack of water and forest fires. Yet you will not see news reports on what can actually be done to stop the growing emergency. For example freezing building permits should lower the demand for water as growing populations demand more water. Building many new lakes and reservoirs could help with fire control and water supply issues as well. Yet we see no news about such topics at all. And on a nation wide basis we see no mention of the notion that population growth increases all of our negative trends such as lack of water, low paying jobs, poverty, addictions, crime and mental illness are all increased by swelling populations.
How does such a system deal with the inevitable dust that gets inside a PC? Fans can be cleaned but how does one deal with this copper mesh?
I am glad that someone is thinking about disaster aid but the most neglected problem is the potential for a severe hurricane in highly crowded areas. South Florida can not be evacuated. We have at least 4 million people and very few highways as a way out. After a storm getting food and water and medical supplies into south Florida is not always possible. Imagine the storage required to feed this large population and the equipment it takes to get food out to the people. Trees cover the streets for days. All power and communications vanish. Safe water is not available nor will sewage systems tend to work. Injured people often have to wait days to be moved to an ER. Areas like Miami can easily be hit much harder than Katrina hit New Orleans. In my town we lost every grocery store nine years ago. those huge flat roofs on grocery stores collapse and the food gets wet and the perishables have no cooling as the power vanishes. We could easily have a million or more people in dire condition after a storm. So we do need several huge storage areas around our state as well as portable hospitals and all kinds of rescue vehicles and food delivery systems ready to go into action at a moments notice. The length of our state is such that we need these massive preparations running the length of the state so that no area is more than two hours away from the stockpiles. Lack of central planning and permitting random growth has created a very deadly trap which nature will spring one day.
I am of the opinion that if the typical person is hit by lightening and we add up the liabilities and assets that we will find most people are worth less than zero. Outstanding mortgages, car loans and other loans are only part of the issue. the cost of dying and the costs of burials as well as the cost of settling estates add to the issue but then there are a pile of other issues. The support of your kids, their education, your widow's needs all are considerations. So when you sell off the house and the car and everything else you can bet that it is rare to have enough life insurance to cover it all. Got three teens? How about college for them? Does your pension die with you or does it stay alive for your widow? As a nation America can not afford itself. As individuals we can not afford ourselves and the exceptions are sort of rare.
The contamination from a reactor spill might be so serious that one spill in ten thousand years might not be an acceptable risk. There is also a problem in that giving one nation the permission to build reactors really gives any regime the right to do the same. And we have no control over the safety or design standards applied in other nations. Nations like Iran and N. Korea act like mental patients who failed to take their meds. I'm not certain these nations should be allowed to chew gum much less have anything to do with nuclear power.
I find it hard to believe that a major earthquake would allow a reactor to remain intact.
I suspect that a wiser society would have a bunch of transformers built and in storage. These days it is not only solar storms that might wreck us. The military apparently has E bombs that wipe out electronics as well as power lies. That means that an enemy will probably also have e bombs at its disposal. One unit is a miniature designed to be used in cop cars that can be aimed at a car that refuses to stop and hit it with a focused wave of power that destroys the cars electronics and brings it to a stop. The device works and hes been demonstrated but needs more work to make it convenient to install in squad cars.
Some people turn of thought when in a fight. It can be a learned talent and it makes ones response much faster and blows delivered much more accurate. The catch is that when in that state extra violence can be delivered as the person is on auto pilot. Courts have not dealt with this as so few people who do this can verbalize what was going on. I'm not so certain that the true capacity to form intent exists in a person in that state of mind. Even advanced chess players can get into a similar state in which they can calculate chess moves like a machine but are sort of not human for a bit after the game is over. A portion of their minds has been diverted elsewhere and it makes them sort of silly emotionally.
The US government needs a strict law that disallows any aid of any kind or financial contacts with nations that use torture. No imports and no exports and no military or humanitarian aid as well as clauses that disallow work arounds by hiring a third party to deal with these nations. For example if either Israel or Palestine tortures just one person we would be required to hold them in total isolation regardless of any consequences. Nations such as we have seen in S. America that use torture through private contractors or commit crimes against humanity would also suffer severe and long lasting isolation. I mean right down to cutting the phone lines and telling them we will check back with them in 30 years to see if they are ready to associate with real human beings again.
At a time in at which criminals felt that cell phones were safe to use in committing their crime planning it caused a lot of them to end up in prison. As it became more apparent that cell phones were being used to catch criminals they switched tactics. So now we may have drones that are quite small and can plant a microphone in the plants near a porch where people are thought to be conspiring to commit crimes or organize terror attacks. Would you want them to really believe that such a technology could be applied to them at this time or perhaps let them think that such a technology is so expensive and rare that only much more important criminals were being watched? Nobody wants the government swimming in their soup bowl but on the other hand we may depend upon that type of law enforcement more than we know. It is not a simple issue and even beyond the Constitution is the fact that the government has a duty to persist over time to keep that constitution alive as well as the american people.
Things are out of balance. We have a Central Intelligence Agency but we do not have a Central Stupidity Agency. Until we do the House of representatives is taking the role and we have people or lizards like Donald Rumsfield and the right wing to help keep our nation well influenced by total stupidity.
Have you seen film of the houses in Florida falling into sink holes? That is what happens when you suck too much water out of an aquifer. When the underground maze of tunnels is filled with water the land above is stable. But when the water level drops and the caverns have air pockets the caves collapse and everything above comes tumbling down quite suddenly. We had one fellows home split in half and he perished when his bed fell into the pit. They could not even retrieve his body so he is now part of our drinking water. Ah, the special tang of a fermented corpse in the water fountain makes a trip to Orlando so interesting and it hasn't harmed Mickey Mouse one bit.
What usually happens is that the well water starts getting nasty and the well must be drilled a bit deeper to get decent water. There are places out west where good water used to be had at 200 ft. and now the wells have been extended down to 450 ft.. The energy used to lift that water gets more and more expensive.
The higher the prices of food items the more restricted the items are in the shopping cart and not just in size but in quality and variety, Corporate food production is not working out for the public at all. I am in one of the numerous areas that has a problem with wild hogs, I am able to buy a whole hog, butchered and ready to cook, at a very low price. The shocker is that the wild hogs taste a lot better than commercial pork. They do not have bacon as the bellies are lean but the quality of the meat is superior. We have no choice but to have hunters collect the wild hogs as they are rather dangerous and can do amazing things to a lawn in just a few minutes of foraging. I am hoping that the wild hogs will be able to eat a few of the pythons that are too common in Florida now and conversely if a python eats a hog that means a pet or somebodies kid will not vanish.
These communities need to shout growth, growth, growth and issue oodles of new business and housing permits. That way these dummies will die from lack of water and stop their economic madness. Oh! And they need to make oodles and oodles of babies also. After all, growth is their god.
Asking customers or others to leave a business has put way too much power in the hands of people unable to handle it. Situations like this deserve a court hearing. At times it may even be in opposition to the Americans With Disabilities Act. For example a stroke victim or a person suffering a mental condition may exhibit unpopular behaviors as a direct consequence of their condition just a Turret's syndrome might cause cursing or obscene utterances. Businesses as well as individuals have to suffer the effects just as the person who bears the illness suffers the effects. Depending upon who is doing the looking even drunken or drug induced behaviors may be a disability. We can not have a pretense that the behavior of an ill person is somehow not part of that person as control is often beyond any abilities that they may have to resist the behaviors. As long as they are non violent I can't see any business denying them access.
There are numerous reasons for people needing glasses that can not currently be helped by laser eye surgery. It obviously works quite well for many other peoples' conditions.
The US has been accused of using Great Britain as a spy agency and having that information sent back to the US and most likely in a reciprocal arrangement. This may predate the current terror issues. What we are seeing is a military that can not fight against a non army type of violent aggression. Therefore intelligence becomes vital as a method of victory over terrorists. This is one of those issues without a good solution. Yes, the level of spying on people by government is dangerous. But failing to do that spying may be even more dangerous. Civilians are caught in the middle and have no access to information that we would need to make any kind of intelligent vote or utter much of an opinion. The US and most other nations have signed the UN bill of rights. If we attach penalties for violation of the UN bill of rights governments would be forced to hold a much higher standard of behavior. Oddly the terrorists are lucky that we are using covert means to fight them. The only other option might be to eliminate them which probably would mean nuclear responses on their cities. If pressed hard enough we have no other effective options than simply bombing them out of existence along with the many millions of innocents who would perish.
Can they stir fry in that thing?
Obviously we don't want to be a culture all about draconian punishments that last forever. But that presents a real conflict. Suppose for a brief moment that you have a slot for one honors student in a scholarship situation that holds great promise for an applicant. You have two of the most perfect applicants that you will ever see and both have wonderful credentials that are far above any reasonable expectations for any student. Yet one student had a minor arrest for being drunk while in the ninth grade. Isn't it fair to take the student with the perfect record? And what does it say about us if we allow a situation in which the less than perfect sometimes do better than those who are unblemished in any way? The problem is that we have very few people with stellar accomplishments and perfect social histories and they deserve the highest rewards whereas we have all kinds of people that have had a serious problem or two along the way who also may have great talents. Shouldn't we always strive to help the best the most? This line of though usually gets me some hate mail.
I think Microsoft is setting up a situation that the courts will find repugnant. Restraining future employment seems to be at play here.
There is simply no easy solution for the border issue. No matter what is done or not done human suffering will take place. Families are split apart. Nations must have borders or the nation ceases to exist. America has never had a working economic system that provides justice for workers, owners, and those unable to be either. Yet, even if we have a border guard stop an immigrant one foot shy of entry it may be a death sentence for the immigrant. With 75 miles of desert behind them and all kinds of hazards to turn someone back may be murder and that someone could include infants or elders. A strong nation ID card would help such that even casual employment was not possible without prior approval by local police would go a long way towards stopping illegals from having the desire to get here. Yet businesses love lowering the wage pool by flooding illegal immigrants into the nation. I wonder just how much the price of groceries would jump if illegal farm labor was shut down. And the absolute bottom line is that reproduction as well as immigration degrades the quality of life for all of us. We need strict population size control.
OK, so they seek to find collisions . But there may be endless forms of universes that are incapable of collisions or having any transfer of information or energy between each other. Perhaps thoughts can create a universe that springs into existence in a sort of absolute elsewhere and continues on its own path.
Providing jobs means absolutely nothing nor does the profit of business. Anything that does harm to the land or oceans should be a felony. People come and go. The land and the oceans must exist for all people in all generations. Our needs are simply not a consideration. The horror of anything in the Arctic or extreme north is even worse as when accidents occur we have no ability to restore or mitigate a disaster.
Without considering the potential need for regulation the first question is whether any effective regulations can be put in place. Getting all nations and perhaps all individuals to follow a rule or law is next to impossible. Can an individual make such a genetic alteration? How could we prevent that? Could it be weaponized by a lunatic government such as N. Korea?