Just thought I should point that out, since no one else here seems aware of this fact.
For fuck's sake, when are all the individuals and companies who have had to spend countless hours and dollars dealing with Microsoft's shoddy security architecture going to demand their pound of flesh?
Microsoft is directly responsible for the existence of Spyware, Malware, and Adware.
It's not like they couldn't have foreseen this and dealt with it years ago. No doubt they've always had smart geeks on staff who would happily patch these holes in all versions of Windows, but these bright minds have been forever hobbled by working for Microsoft, which is primarily a marketing firm.
Considering that most of us use their OS's to do our work, and every hour of our time is worth something, and we've spent so much of it on preventable headaches, frankly Microsoft owes us thousands of dollars apiece.
Before you go off on your philanthropic vacation Mister Gates, pay up!
Ok, this is a thought-experiment. Take it or leave it....
What is evil for a stone? A stone has no interests to concern itself with.
"Evil" is that which is harmful to a living being, in other words that which threatens, harms, coerces, or destroys a living being.
Is killing always evil, and is it so for all involved? Perhaps a parent saves his child from a perceived thug by killing him. Perhaps the parent felt no particular ill-will, but acted rashly and with too much force. Has the person who was killed had evil perpetrated against him? Has the parent committed an evil deed or a good one, or both? How would you mix them in your metaphysical cauldron?
Likewise, perhaps a person acts out of malice, and then a moment later feels regret. Where has the evil gone? Poof! Maybe it never existed.
The continuum of good versus evil is broad and subjective. That evil which is done today may turn out to be beneficial in the long run. That good which is done today may turn out to foster future evil! Yet there is no such thing as "disembodied evil." It is a value judgment brought to a particular situation, and one which always exists with respect to Life.
Life gives rise to the whole continuum of good/evil. To wit, the concept of "resources" is meaningless without Beings: entities having needs. There is an intimate connection between all concepts which emanate from the existence of living beings. As to the relation of resources to the concept of good/evil, that which provides for the sustenance of life is generally Good, that which deprives is Evil. (Except of course in those instances where provision is detrimental and deprivation is beneficial, in which case provision is really deprivation and deprivation is actually provision.)
The original language of Genesis used to describe the Tree in the Garden is not "good and evil" in the general sense but rather "advantageous and disadvantageous," which specifically imply beings having interests. In other words, the allegory of Adam and Eve describes the emerging awareness of self/other, and knowledge of those fruits which benefit or harm self/other.
While there is are fairly well-defined objective standards as to what constitutes a resource, or a need, there is a much slipperier and more subjective notion of what constitutes good/evil (and if you ask me, these words have been so usurped by armchair ideologues they have lost all sense of rational meaning).
But it is clear that to provide resources for another is an act of good, and so we should seek to be giving. And to deprive another of what they need is an act of "evil" so we should resist our tendency to be stingy.
So, by this definition, are most of us "good" or "evil" or something in-between? Indeed, how does "God" fare in this test?
The existence of God can only be proved subjectively, and even then it's still a matter of interpreting a numinous subjective experience, and deciding to name it "God." And you could still be fooling yourself. Maybe it wasn't THE GOD, but just A REALLY MIGHTY GODLIKE ENTITY. How would you know the difference?
Anyhow, before one decides whether to believe in "God" it's a good idea to have a definition of what He is so one knows what to look for.
In my case, I believe God would have to be utterly transcendent, and an immaterial non-composite entity. In other words, something nonexistent. Can something nonexistent exist?
On the other hand, I also believe that God is all there is, and there is nothing that is not God. If one could take a step back and look at *everything* one could observe the totality of God. However, the All is both eternal and infinite. One could not ever see the totality, nor indeed can "God" ever actually be realized, because the totality is in constant flux.
Since God is all that exists and also the utter transcendence of existence, the union of many paradoxes would be required to fully appreciate the nature of "God." Such a mind transcends - and encompasses - reason, and hence it is beyond knowledge, proof, and expressibility in language.
Language and reason are tools for sharing experience, but they are not the only means. I may not be able to describe God, but I can point you to the door beyond which you can experience God, and then you can know for yourself.
Science - String Theory especially - is something like that too. The value of science is that it gives us the means to test and manipulate reality. Within the macroscopic realm it is expressible via the conventions of common experience. But as we get into quantum physics and string theory the ideas become uncanny. When you try to explain the relation of a string to space-time, the common experience of cause preceding effect no longer applies. So we need new language to express these new experiences. At a certain point these "experiences" may well become utterly inexpressible.
But perhaps, just like the experience of union with the Ultimate, there is a conventional means to point the right direction.
Well, you forgot one other thing about science: If my science says that a "cat" by definition has a tail, then these things you call "cats without tails" aren't actually "cats" at all, but something else, perhaps yet to be named.
I have no idea why I felt the need to bring that up.
Hey, do you have any idea how much money there is in pharmaceuticals to treat kids who consume too much simple carbohydrates? Do you have any idea of the sheer mountains of cash to be made from adult-onset diabetes and obesity? The meat producers certainly don't want us to know that eating too much protein (i.e., more than 5% of your diet) leads to blood acidosis, increased cholesterol, and chronic kidney stress.
And do you know how many tons of soy go into our factory-farmed cattle to make that cheap, taxpayer-subsidized burger on your plate? Somebody has to grow all that soy, you know. And as you may know, petroleum companies own all the seed companies and the petro-chemical companies produce all the nitrogen fertilizers to allow things to grow in depleted soil, so you're stepping on some big toes here. It's like, you want to ruin the whole game, man!
Look, the agro-pharmaceutical cartel is one of the fastest growing industries right now, and they depend on our ignorance and acquiescence. For their sake, if nothing else, we should eat what tastes good as often as possible regardless of nutritional value. Anything else would be anti-capitalist.
And it's not just the pharmaceutical companies and the private hospitals that need our clogged organs to survive. Many of these ADD kids are slated for residency in America's emerging privatized prison system.
If we want these capitalist enterprises to succeed, we must continue to push standardized tests into the core of our educational curricula. We must continue to feed our children the cheapest, fattiest, and most sugar-laden foods we can. And by god, we must get more soda machines into our schools. By these means we can keep them on their poor diets, increase their stress, cause them to lose focus, and peddle more pharmaceuticals to them.
How can anyone be against using such means to increase profits and grow markets? Everyone understands that war and crisis are extremely profitable for those who can offer a little relief at a price. We live in a world where profit is an end unto itself, and corporations don't have to consider any "big picture" beyond their own survival. The stockholder is all who matters. Everyone else is cattle, and we should just take our pills and learn to live with it.
I mean, if people switch to a proper vegetarian diet, how will they ever be made dependent for life on pharmaceutical treatments for diabetes and high cholesterol? If people stop eating too much meat, what will become of all that soy, and what will happen to mom and pop factory farmer?
There's a lesson here for those starry-eyed adolescents who think the power of the blog is going to triumph over the power of the boardroom.
Don't be so narrow! The blogs are having an effect, and it's growing. Consider the recent court ruling (I think it was an Apple vs blogger case) that extended the same standards to bloggers as are extended to journalists. And consider the turnout for the Yearly Kos event.
The lesson here is simple: There are blogs you can trust and there are those you can't. And most of us are savvy enough to know the difference.
This handy utility can image any disk, including the boot disk, and you can be selective about what gets copied. It can even make a bootable optical backup, which can sometimes be useful. I believe it's as close to ghost as you'll find on the Mac right now.
If only this kind of fear-mongering worked for things that matter on a broader, deeper scale...
I'm thinking particularly of the incessant decay of the US quality of life due to the usurpation of our systems of agriculture, education, health, and welfare by private interests. The failure to properly develop these systems is leading inexorably to the collapse of the USA. No one is afraid because the frog in the slow boiling pot never knows its predicament till it's too late.
People should also be trembling at the insane schemes being used to divert of the people's wealth through the "war-funnel" directly into the pockets of a few industrialists, primarily to fund the further usurpation of the people's government by corporatists.
For some reason, even after the horrors of Nazism, our current brand of Fascism doesn't seem to scare people, even as it undermines and threatens our lives in a thousand subtle ways. The air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, and the society we live in are becoming increasingly dangerous to our own health. Yet no one stirs as their neighbors are snatched up from empty factory floors and sent to foreign lands to be maimed and killed to enrich Halliburton. No one even blinks as petroleum and agriculture collude to foster diseases that keep the pharmaceutical stocks ballooning.
east timor, petroleum, nafta, fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, 9-11, coyness, illegal surveillance, gmo seeds, data mining, mad cow disease, mandatory testing, guantanamo bay, rampant privatization, obtuseness, selling off the commons, executive war crimes, strip mining, the war on terra, faux news, cafta, kissinger, allende, iraq, bunker busters, missing billions, media culpa, torture, abu ghraib, reality television....
The connections are clear and simple. The machine now bleeds the people, everywhere, without conscience.
The interesting part of the question to me is, the fact that it makes you look at the egg as the point of most radical change, a point on the line of evolution. And it nicely illustrates the way our minds think about that continuum of change, and how we decide when an evolving form merits one designation, and not another. The animals that gave birth to the class of beings we now call "chickens" were themselves, not quite chickeny enough to be themselves "chickens."
Since chickens have been artificially selected by humans for centuries, if not millenia, they have obtained an especially "chicken-like" form, consciously and unconsciously sculpted by the human chicken aesthetic.
Interesting now is the highly concentrated factory farm method of chicken selection. The chickens are stressed beyond their original design, and so factory farmers are forced to use more forceful methods to predominate over the ailments of overstressed overcrowded fowl. The evolved chicken factory employs de-beaking as the solution to aggression, and antibiotics boosters as the solution to natural death, before conveying them into the slaughtering and plucking machines.
Which leads to the next axiom: "Never trust an inexpensive chicken."
Similar conditions exist for the majority of laying hens, and who knows what it does to the eggs? I don't eat inexpensive chickens or eggs any more, but plenty of people will.
I imagine a science fiction scenario where the factory method of chicken evolution is permitted to continue unrestrained for many centuries. The chickens continue to evolve, selected for their hardiness and calmness under pressure.
But what will the chicken evolve into?
Will humans of the future ask, "Which came first, the Xorph or the Cubulex?"
Could there one day be a chicken equivalent of the Kwisatz Haderach?
Will chickens become so powerful that they rebel against the factory workers, and massacre the human race?
Or, will chickens become so overstressed, right down to their genetics, that the species loses its viability?
Or, could the chicken's natural genetics, in its spontaneous, creative way, evolve antibodies or poisons in their flesh to infect and debilitate humans, in the same way as toads developed poisons to protect them?
Or, since chickens are descended from dinosaurs, maybe the cumulative effect of generations of genetic pressure could cause latent DNA to awaken, so that chickens develop more dinosaur-like traits, reverting to more primordial forms. Chickens on psilocybin suspended in sensory deprivation tanks - like in "Altered States."
Or, in another scenario, chicken chemistry becomes a major factor in selecting human offspring, and as a result over many millenia chicken geist merges with human geist. Chicken chemistry subtly influences the chemistry of the human womb, infants are born early, die young, and the United States eventually has the second-highest infant mortality rate of all industrialized nations.
In another scenario, it is learned that KFC is not really chicken, that the chain long ago sought out chickens with extra limbs and those born without brains, and began genetically selecting these birds. They turn out to be funding studies into chicken DNA so that they can grow chicken meat in any desired form. Some of the horrors uncovered are described as "large pulsing triple-breasted oysters" and "quivering picushions bearing as many as twenty chicken legs and thighs." When the legal smoke clears nothing happens. KFC stock doubles every month as their patented creations become staggeringly popular worldwide.
Exactly. And the kind of prayer prescribed by Jesus Christ is what we nowadays call "meditation" which involves the deeper precursors of the "rational" mind... which are also yourself.
Some of my other favorite teachings of Jesus and his chroniclers: - Ideology is poisonous. - Authority figures are bogus. - Tradition and dogma are silly. - Spontaneity is a blessed thing. - Extending analogies and showing humility demonstrate faith. - Marriage is forever, except when it isn't. - Bread and fish go a longer way if the pieces are small. - If you keep your calm, even a storm can't sink you. - One day all this allegory will be obsoleted by scientific discovery. - Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.
Now I'm not a "Christian" in the modern sense - one who takes Jesus to be THE SON OF GOD. But you could call me a Christian in the sense that I totally know the spirit from which he's expressing this stuff, and why it is beneficial.
That said, I think it's very silly to try to follow literally every tenet set forth in the Bible by every self-professed prophet and tribal leader going back to the beginning of recorded tribal history in that particular region of the world. Especially when Jesus Christ himself plainly states that the ancient laws and tenets had been passed to put reins on crude uncivilized people. Jesus Christ gives nice simple guidelines: be generous, love people, and work on your own inner-peace through meditation. All the old dogma, he insists, is just so much clutter.
Naturally I find it troubling when I hear people getting all hung up about the "divinity" of "scripture" and so forth as if it was all magic and mystical artifacts of the Hand of God The Father, Almighty Lord, blah blah blah. I mean, okay, if you need to have that shallow kind of "awe" in your life, keep on keeping on, brother. But frankly, there's enough to be awestruck about just sitting by a river, or hanging out in a meadow, and the "divine scripture" looks to me like so much tattered raiment next to the beauty of the natural world and the luminosity of our fellow beings.
My suggestion is, next time you feel inspired by a piece of scripture don't stop there, go seek out the thing in the world that inspired it, and seek out the thing in yourself that reverberates along with it. And don't go repeating the bloody scripture all over the place to living, vibrant people like me who see it plainly as a relic far removed from immanent reality.
In short, and to paraphrase Jesus Christ once more: "Get real."
That's what I'm talking about! Set it up so the people can more readily scrutinize their elected and appointed public officials. They're the ones who should be under constant surveillance! I'd like to have a camera in Florida right now, keeping an eye on Jeb Bush and the cleanup men flown in from Texas, to be able to watch them shredding those incriminating documents. It is we the people who are in charge, not these morons. They need to start remembering their place, that they serve you and me, and all the people, not just a manipulable faction who can be cowed into voting in our own oppression. We need to make the social position of public servant less desirable to power-seekers, frankly. Strip it of all the trappings of affluence, which is entirely undeserved. And we need to remove the machinery by which corporate money maintains a thousand times more influence in government than the will of the people.
Such a revolution is possible. Quite simply, the people must be reminded of our American roots. The people looking for a common cause have only to look to our founding principles, which are not from some particular brand of ideology or religion. Our system of laws was founded in principles designed to undermine tyranny and prevent the abuse of power. Period.
The current corporate fascism was not imagined in particular at the time of our founding. However, the danger of monied interests corrupting officials and the Democratic process was well-understood. The framers of the Constitution provided for this almost explicitly, but due to the complex nature of government, the stagnation of bureaucracy, the bamboozlement of the people, the leveraging of weakness and ambiguity in the law, and the freakish slowness of reform, there is no overarching power that can hold back emergent powers like the profit-centric Military Industrial Complex, Pharmaceutical Companies, and Petro interests.
The result of all this is of course the rape of the People by monied interests, who are allowed by the crumbling system to usurp every bit of our collective wealth. Since we are the root power, ir is up to us to insist on more controls. If corporations are allowed to encroach in the workings of Government then they should be treated as another branch of Government. You might say, they are the branch that fulfills the practical needs of society and creates concentrations of wealth bound to that purpose. Under that theory, every cent a company makes should go to its own sustenance, and none should go into coercing the other branches. If it wants to act as if it were a branch of government it should be bound by the clause concerning the limitation of powers.
There are a few people out there who want to believe that this country was founded on Christian or Judeo-Christian principles. They would have the cart placed before the horse! Those people who call themselves Christian would do well to remember that the teacher they worship taught specifically that one should not follow laws blindly nor submit to external authority.
Jesus even went so far as to say - not in so many words - that Moses wrote the Ten Commandments and deliberately delivered them under the aegis of divine authority in order to sell them to his people. He states that the people were too hardened to accept civil law on its inherent merits, so Moses took a deep breath and wisely used the leverage he had. The founder of Judeo-Christian ethics was a master politician. He got you to listen. Did you? He told you: It's time for you to be the grown-up and understand why civil laws are metaphysically meritorious, and stop kowtowing to external coercive authority.
Okay, that's my diatribe for today. If I wax verbose it's only because I see things going to shit because of corruption. I see the people's time, air, water, and minds being stolen away. I see the rulers of this country - you and me - sleeping on the job, letting these charlatans get away with murder every minute of every day. I see high-paid hacks poisoning the discourse on a hundred channels. I see the mindset of "me and mine" eroding the culture, turning us all into cancer cells in the body politic.
I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more!
...the 'liberal' media continuously proclaiming that Democrats also took money...
And I'll bet you they've convinced themselves it's okay to keep spreading this disinformation, because it demonstrates that "they're not biased." They're willing to get everyone caught up in this thing, justifiably or not, for their own ends and the sake of appearances.
Slashdot Mirror
Analogy extended: Maybe they should stop hiring a cook who always shits in their food.
Just thought I should point that out, since no one else here seems aware of this fact.
For fuck's sake, when are all the individuals and companies who have had to spend countless hours and dollars dealing with Microsoft's shoddy security architecture going to demand their pound of flesh?
Microsoft is directly responsible for the existence of Spyware, Malware, and Adware.
It's not like they couldn't have foreseen this and dealt with it years ago. No doubt they've always had smart geeks on staff who would happily patch these holes in all versions of Windows, but these bright minds have been forever hobbled by working for Microsoft, which is primarily a marketing firm.
Considering that most of us use their OS's to do our work, and every hour of our time is worth something, and we've spent so much of it on preventable headaches, frankly Microsoft owes us thousands of dollars apiece.
Before you go off on your philanthropic vacation Mister Gates, pay up!
How is it people never realize: There is nothing more materialistic than belief in a God who "does" things.
Ok, this is a thought-experiment. Take it or leave it....
What is evil for a stone? A stone has no interests to concern itself with.
"Evil" is that which is harmful to a living being, in other words that which threatens, harms, coerces, or destroys a living being.
Is killing always evil, and is it so for all involved? Perhaps a parent saves his child from a perceived thug by killing him. Perhaps the parent felt no particular ill-will, but acted rashly and with too much force. Has the person who was killed had evil perpetrated against him? Has the parent committed an evil deed or a good one, or both? How would you mix them in your metaphysical cauldron?
Likewise, perhaps a person acts out of malice, and then a moment later feels regret. Where has the evil gone? Poof! Maybe it never existed.
The continuum of good versus evil is broad and subjective. That evil which is done today may turn out to be beneficial in the long run. That good which is done today may turn out to foster future evil! Yet there is no such thing as "disembodied evil." It is a value judgment brought to a particular situation, and one which always exists with respect to Life.
Life gives rise to the whole continuum of good/evil. To wit, the concept of "resources" is meaningless without Beings: entities having needs. There is an intimate connection between all concepts which emanate from the existence of living beings. As to the relation of resources to the concept of good/evil, that which provides for the sustenance of life is generally Good, that which deprives is Evil. (Except of course in those instances where provision is detrimental and deprivation is beneficial, in which case provision is really deprivation and deprivation is actually provision.)
The original language of Genesis used to describe the Tree in the Garden is not "good and evil" in the general sense but rather "advantageous and disadvantageous," which specifically imply beings having interests. In other words, the allegory of Adam and Eve describes the emerging awareness of self/other, and knowledge of those fruits which benefit or harm self/other.
While there is are fairly well-defined objective standards as to what constitutes a resource, or a need, there is a much slipperier and more subjective notion of what constitutes good/evil (and if you ask me, these words have been so usurped by armchair ideologues they have lost all sense of rational meaning).
But it is clear that to provide resources for another is an act of good, and so we should seek to be giving. And to deprive another of what they need is an act of "evil" so we should resist our tendency to be stingy.
So, by this definition, are most of us "good" or "evil" or something in-between? Indeed, how does "God" fare in this test?
.
The existence of God can only be proved subjectively, and even then it's still a matter of interpreting a numinous subjective experience, and deciding to name it "God." And you could still be fooling yourself. Maybe it wasn't THE GOD, but just A REALLY MIGHTY GODLIKE ENTITY. How would you know the difference?
Anyhow, before one decides whether to believe in "God" it's a good idea to have a definition of what He is so one knows what to look for.
In my case, I believe God would have to be utterly transcendent, and an immaterial non-composite entity. In other words, something nonexistent. Can something nonexistent exist?
On the other hand, I also believe that God is all there is, and there is nothing that is not God. If one could take a step back and look at *everything* one could observe the totality of God. However, the All is both eternal and infinite. One could not ever see the totality, nor indeed can "God" ever actually be realized, because the totality is in constant flux.
Since God is all that exists and also the utter transcendence of existence, the union of many paradoxes would be required to fully appreciate the nature of "God." Such a mind transcends - and encompasses - reason, and hence it is beyond knowledge, proof, and expressibility in language.
Language and reason are tools for sharing experience, but they are not the only means. I may not be able to describe God, but I can point you to the door beyond which you can experience God, and then you can know for yourself.
Science - String Theory especially - is something like that too. The value of science is that it gives us the means to test and manipulate reality. Within the macroscopic realm it is expressible via the conventions of common experience. But as we get into quantum physics and string theory the ideas become uncanny. When you try to explain the relation of a string to space-time, the common experience of cause preceding effect no longer applies. So we need new language to express these new experiences. At a certain point these "experiences" may well become utterly inexpressible.
But perhaps, just like the experience of union with the Ultimate, there is a conventional means to point the right direction.
.
Well, you forgot one other thing about science: If my science says that a "cat" by definition has a tail, then these things you call "cats without tails" aren't actually "cats" at all, but something else, perhaps yet to be named.
I have no idea why I felt the need to bring that up.
It makes me think of a logical fallacy: Post hoc ergo propter hoc .
Every time I play "rock, scissors, paper, gun" it always ends in a stalemate!
The projection looks very distorted projected on the ceiling of my thatch-roofed cottage. Even if I adjust the --- aggghhhh!!!
Hey, do you have any idea how much money there is in pharmaceuticals to treat kids who consume too much simple carbohydrates? Do you have any idea of the sheer mountains of cash to be made from adult-onset diabetes and obesity? The meat producers certainly don't want us to know that eating too much protein (i.e., more than 5% of your diet) leads to blood acidosis, increased cholesterol, and chronic kidney stress.
And do you know how many tons of soy go into our factory-farmed cattle to make that cheap, taxpayer-subsidized burger on your plate? Somebody has to grow all that soy, you know. And as you may know, petroleum companies own all the seed companies and the petro-chemical companies produce all the nitrogen fertilizers to allow things to grow in depleted soil, so you're stepping on some big toes here. It's like, you want to ruin the whole game, man!
Look, the agro-pharmaceutical cartel is one of the fastest growing industries right now, and they depend on our ignorance and acquiescence. For their sake, if nothing else, we should eat what tastes good as often as possible regardless of nutritional value. Anything else would be anti-capitalist.
And it's not just the pharmaceutical companies and the private hospitals that need our clogged organs to survive. Many of these ADD kids are slated for residency in America's emerging privatized prison system.
If we want these capitalist enterprises to succeed, we must continue to push standardized tests into the core of our educational curricula. We must continue to feed our children the cheapest, fattiest, and most sugar-laden foods we can. And by god, we must get more soda machines into our schools. By these means we can keep them on their poor diets, increase their stress, cause them to lose focus, and peddle more pharmaceuticals to them.
How can anyone be against using such means to increase profits and grow markets? Everyone understands that war and crisis are extremely profitable for those who can offer a little relief at a price. We live in a world where profit is an end unto itself, and corporations don't have to consider any "big picture" beyond their own survival. The stockholder is all who matters. Everyone else is cattle, and we should just take our pills and learn to live with it.
I mean, if people switch to a proper vegetarian diet, how will they ever be made dependent for life on pharmaceutical treatments for diabetes and high cholesterol? If people stop eating too much meat, what will become of all that soy, and what will happen to mom and pop factory farmer?
I shudder to think.
It was, until Pat Benatar got everyone confused with her song "All Fired Up."
... AMD=AMD ?
This handy utility can image any disk, including the boot disk, and you can be selective about what gets copied. It can even make a bootable optical backup, which can sometimes be useful. I believe it's as close to ghost as you'll find on the Mac right now.
Ha ha, just kidding. Maybe they'll post a news item about it.
I kinda like the layout. Still, I'm gonna check my preferences to see if I have other options...
If only this kind of fear-mongering worked for things that matter on a broader, deeper scale...
I'm thinking particularly of the incessant decay of the US quality of life due to the usurpation of our systems of agriculture, education, health, and welfare by private interests. The failure to properly develop these systems is leading inexorably to the collapse of the USA. No one is afraid because the frog in the slow boiling pot never knows its predicament till it's too late.
People should also be trembling at the insane schemes being used to divert of the people's wealth through the "war-funnel" directly into the pockets of a few industrialists, primarily to fund the further usurpation of the people's government by corporatists.
For some reason, even after the horrors of Nazism, our current brand of Fascism doesn't seem to scare people, even as it undermines and threatens our lives in a thousand subtle ways. The air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, and the society we live in are becoming increasingly dangerous to our own health. Yet no one stirs as their neighbors are snatched up from empty factory floors and sent to foreign lands to be maimed and killed to enrich Halliburton. No one even blinks as petroleum and agriculture collude to foster diseases that keep the pharmaceutical stocks ballooning.
east timor, petroleum, nafta, fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, 9-11, coyness, illegal surveillance, gmo seeds, data mining, mad cow disease, mandatory testing, guantanamo bay, rampant privatization, obtuseness, selling off the commons, executive war crimes, strip mining, the war on terra, faux news, cafta, kissinger, allende, iraq, bunker busters, missing billions, media culpa, torture, abu ghraib, reality television....
The connections are clear and simple. The machine now bleeds the people, everywhere, without conscience.
Be afraid, be very afraid.
The interesting part of the question to me is, the fact that it makes you look at the egg as the point of most radical change, a point on the line of evolution. And it nicely illustrates the way our minds think about that continuum of change, and how we decide when an evolving form merits one designation, and not another. The animals that gave birth to the class of beings we now call "chickens" were themselves, not quite chickeny enough to be themselves "chickens."
Since chickens have been artificially selected by humans for centuries, if not millenia, they have obtained an especially "chicken-like" form, consciously and unconsciously sculpted by the human chicken aesthetic.
Interesting now is the highly concentrated factory farm method of chicken selection. The chickens are stressed beyond their original design, and so factory farmers are forced to use more forceful methods to predominate over the ailments of overstressed overcrowded fowl. The evolved chicken factory employs de-beaking as the solution to aggression, and antibiotics boosters as the solution to natural death, before conveying them into the slaughtering and plucking machines.
Which leads to the next axiom: "Never trust an inexpensive chicken."
Similar conditions exist for the majority of laying hens, and who knows what it does to the eggs? I don't eat inexpensive chickens or eggs any more, but plenty of people will.
I imagine a science fiction scenario where the factory method of chicken evolution is permitted to continue unrestrained for many centuries. The chickens continue to evolve, selected for their hardiness and calmness under pressure.
But what will the chicken evolve into?
Will humans of the future ask, "Which came first, the Xorph or the Cubulex?"
Could there one day be a chicken equivalent of the Kwisatz Haderach?
Will chickens become so powerful that they rebel against the factory workers, and massacre the human race?
Or, will chickens become so overstressed, right down to their genetics, that the species loses its viability?
Or, could the chicken's natural genetics, in its spontaneous, creative way, evolve antibodies or poisons in their flesh to infect and debilitate humans, in the same way as toads developed poisons to protect them?
Or, since chickens are descended from dinosaurs, maybe the cumulative effect of generations of genetic pressure could cause latent DNA to awaken, so that chickens develop more dinosaur-like traits, reverting to more primordial forms. Chickens on psilocybin suspended in sensory deprivation tanks - like in "Altered States."
Or, in another scenario, chicken chemistry becomes a major factor in selecting human offspring, and as a result over many millenia chicken geist merges with human geist. Chicken chemistry subtly influences the chemistry of the human womb, infants are born early, die young, and the United States eventually has the second-highest infant mortality rate of all industrialized nations.
In another scenario, it is learned that KFC is not really chicken, that the chain long ago sought out chickens with extra limbs and those born without brains, and began genetically selecting these birds. They turn out to be funding studies into chicken DNA so that they can grow chicken meat in any desired form. Some of the horrors uncovered are described as "large pulsing triple-breasted oysters" and "quivering picushions bearing as many as twenty chicken legs and thighs." When the legal smoke clears nothing happens. KFC stock doubles every month as their patented creations become staggeringly popular worldwide.
And here I thought the unattributed presentation of outdated "evidence" to the U.N. was the new plagiarism. I stand corrected.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1932100385/104-65 24352-2072744?v=glance&n=283155
Heh, obviously in my rant I'm addressing the original haughty poster and not the parent of my reply!
Exactly. And the kind of prayer prescribed by Jesus Christ is what we nowadays call "meditation" which involves the deeper precursors of the "rational" mind... which are also yourself.
Some of my other favorite teachings of Jesus and his chroniclers:
- Ideology is poisonous.
- Authority figures are bogus.
- Tradition and dogma are silly.
- Spontaneity is a blessed thing.
- Extending analogies and showing humility demonstrate faith.
- Marriage is forever, except when it isn't.
- Bread and fish go a longer way if the pieces are small.
- If you keep your calm, even a storm can't sink you.
- One day all this allegory will be obsoleted by scientific discovery.
- Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.
Now I'm not a "Christian" in the modern sense - one who takes Jesus to be THE SON OF GOD. But you could call me a Christian in the sense that I totally know the spirit from which he's expressing this stuff, and why it is beneficial.
That said, I think it's very silly to try to follow literally every tenet set forth in the Bible by every self-professed prophet and tribal leader going back to the beginning of recorded tribal history in that particular region of the world. Especially when Jesus Christ himself plainly states that the ancient laws and tenets had been passed to put reins on crude uncivilized people. Jesus Christ gives nice simple guidelines: be generous, love people, and work on your own inner-peace through meditation. All the old dogma, he insists, is just so much clutter.
Naturally I find it troubling when I hear people getting all hung up about the "divinity" of "scripture" and so forth as if it was all magic and mystical artifacts of the Hand of God The Father, Almighty Lord, blah blah blah. I mean, okay, if you need to have that shallow kind of "awe" in your life, keep on keeping on, brother. But frankly, there's enough to be awestruck about just sitting by a river, or hanging out in a meadow, and the "divine scripture" looks to me like so much tattered raiment next to the beauty of the natural world and the luminosity of our fellow beings.
My suggestion is, next time you feel inspired by a piece of scripture don't stop there, go seek out the thing in the world that inspired it, and seek out the thing in yourself that reverberates along with it. And don't go repeating the bloody scripture all over the place to living, vibrant people like me who see it plainly as a relic far removed from immanent reality.
In short, and to paraphrase Jesus Christ once more: "Get real."
...Yes, and some of those romance novels use the word "fundament" way too liberally.
That's what I'm talking about! Set it up so the people can more readily scrutinize their elected and appointed public officials. They're the ones who should be under constant surveillance! I'd like to have a camera in Florida right now, keeping an eye on Jeb Bush and the cleanup men flown in from Texas, to be able to watch them shredding those incriminating documents. It is we the people who are in charge, not these morons. They need to start remembering their place, that they serve you and me, and all the people, not just a manipulable faction who can be cowed into voting in our own oppression. We need to make the social position of public servant less desirable to power-seekers, frankly. Strip it of all the trappings of affluence, which is entirely undeserved. And we need to remove the machinery by which corporate money maintains a thousand times more influence in government than the will of the people.
Such a revolution is possible. Quite simply, the people must be reminded of our American roots. The people looking for a common cause have only to look to our founding principles, which are not from some particular brand of ideology or religion. Our system of laws was founded in principles designed to undermine tyranny and prevent the abuse of power. Period.
The current corporate fascism was not imagined in particular at the time of our founding. However, the danger of monied interests corrupting officials and the Democratic process was well-understood. The framers of the Constitution provided for this almost explicitly, but due to the complex nature of government, the stagnation of bureaucracy, the bamboozlement of the people, the leveraging of weakness and ambiguity in the law, and the freakish slowness of reform, there is no overarching power that can hold back emergent powers like the profit-centric Military Industrial Complex, Pharmaceutical Companies, and Petro interests.
The result of all this is of course the rape of the People by monied interests, who are allowed by the crumbling system to usurp every bit of our collective wealth. Since we are the root power, ir is up to us to insist on more controls. If corporations are allowed to encroach in the workings of Government then they should be treated as another branch of Government. You might say, they are the branch that fulfills the practical needs of society and creates concentrations of wealth bound to that purpose. Under that theory, every cent a company makes should go to its own sustenance, and none should go into coercing the other branches. If it wants to act as if it were a branch of government it should be bound by the clause concerning the limitation of powers.
There are a few people out there who want to believe that this country was founded on Christian or Judeo-Christian principles. They would have the cart placed before the horse! Those people who call themselves Christian would do well to remember that the teacher they worship taught specifically that one should not follow laws blindly nor submit to external authority.
Jesus even went so far as to say - not in so many words - that Moses wrote the Ten Commandments and deliberately delivered them under the aegis of divine authority in order to sell them to his people. He states that the people were too hardened to accept civil law on its inherent merits, so Moses took a deep breath and wisely used the leverage he had. The founder of Judeo-Christian ethics was a master politician. He got you to listen. Did you? He told you: It's time for you to be the grown-up and understand why civil laws are metaphysically meritorious, and stop kowtowing to external coercive authority.
Okay, that's my diatribe for today. If I wax verbose it's only because I see things going to shit because of corruption. I see the people's time, air, water, and minds being stolen away. I see the rulers of this country - you and me - sleeping on the job, letting these charlatans get away with murder every minute of every day. I see high-paid hacks poisoning the discourse on a hundred channels. I see the mindset of "me and mine" eroding the culture, turning us all into cancer cells in the body politic.
I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more!
Why would it matter if humans weren't here?
And I'll bet you they've convinced themselves it's okay to keep spreading this disinformation, because it demonstrates that "they're not biased." They're willing to get everyone caught up in this thing, justifiably or not, for their own ends and the sake of appearances.
Poor corporate media. Wimps, lackeys, weaklings....