http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
Nerds are unpopular because they are pricks. Some of the meanest, most vicious and petty people I have ever met were the ones who were intelligent and well-educated.
You're mistaken. The American people don't object to the killing or abuse of their OWN people either. It is well known that American prisons are full of non-violent druggies subjected to rape, torture, and all forms of sexual violence. Instead of a national outcry against this, it is treated as a subject for late-night humor. When blacks in Oakland protest against a black boy having been murdered, shot point blank in the back while restrained on the BART - most Americans were angry at the PROTESTORS and cheered when the police fired tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse them. Americans will only become angry when it is a friend, neighbor, or family member who is abused. Anyone else and it becomes ENTERTAINMENT. The show "Cops" exists as a voyeuristic corruption of the justice system which is obviously based on the court room in Idiocracy.
The American people were the goose who laid the golden egg. We created so much technological innovation and such fine products at such low prices that the parasite of government couldn't resist. They bled us slowly, little by little. Income tax, social security (which my generation won't see a dime of,) state income tax, sales tax, property tax, emissions tax, tax and fees on everything. They drained the productivity of the American worker for decades, but we were so strong that we could feed the parasite and ourselves. But now we are drained dry and dying, the government is throttling the golden goose screaming for more money. There is no more money. I fear that soon the government will openly attack and beat the golden goose, using violence to try to coerce us into producing even more for their use when we are tapped out. The use of LRAD on protestors and tasers on lippy grandmothers will become even more widespread, mark my words.
What people refuse to understand is that our lives are no more important to our benevolent government than the lives of the ragheads in the mountains of Waziristan. Do you really think Obama cares about YOU? he doesn't care about human life in Pakistan or Iraq, why should he care about human life in Detriot or San Diego? The moment it becomes more profitable to have you dead than alive from the view of the US gov't, they will find a justification to be rid of you. At Waco they used army equipment against people who had committed NO CRIMES. If we do not speak out about the lives of civilians in these far-flung nations these drones will be used against us next.
By its own definition, the US government is a terrorist regime. It utilizes violence to try to effect political change in other nations. According to Army Counterinsurgency Handbook (authored in part by Gen. Patraeus,) that is a defining characteristic of terrorist entities. The Taliban didn't attack us on 9/11... a bunch of Saudi Arabians, based in Florida and European nations, attacked us on 9/11. The Taliban offered to turn over Bin Ladin upon receipt of evidence that he was responsible for the attacks. The US Gov't refused. Today, EVERYONE responsible for 9/11 is DEAD or JAILED, and the US is waging ceaseless terrorist attacks on the Pashtun ethnic group of Pakistan and Afghanistan for NO APPARENT REASON. The usage of terrorist drone strikes, which have killed hundreds if not thousands of non-combatants this year, represents the kind of cowardice nominally associated with the BRAVE fighters of the so-called Taliban which resist the alien occupation of their country.
If it is secret why do you know about it? Why did they declare it to the IAEA? This is the opposite of secret. This is the reverse of secret. This is not secrecy. A secret is something you don't declare to the world.
1. Iran and Al-Queda are officially at war.
2. Iran is not Sunni, Al-Queda is Wahhabi a subset of Sunni Islam. It's like claiming that the United States is responsible for terrorism in Ireland because both nations are Christian. It is an inherently racist claim and ignores a huge amount of non-trivial distinction between Iranians and Saudi Arabian Arabs.
3. There are no good and peaceful Arabs. There is no good and peaceful collective of people anywhere. All the good and peaceful races were wiped out by evil and warlike races.
4. Israel attacks and is under attack. No moral high ground there.
5. Iran and Syria have long had enough VX to wipe out all of Israel and not used it. Nuclear weapons are a scare tactic; they have long held sufficient WMDs if they were truly suicidal.
6. Lines in the sand are not a pragmatic strategic decision.
There is no evidence that they are NOT following the rules. It is only speculation. Personally, I think that Iran already has nuclear weapons purchased from Pakistan in exchange for missile tech. It's a moot point anyway; Iran is good friends with Syria and Syria has enough chemical weapons and nerve agents to make Fallout 3 come true. Nuclear weapons aren't nearly as frightening to me as VX, and the Iranian-Syrian alliance has had neurotoxin in sufficient quantities to wipe out Israel for some time, and not used it. The bread and butter for Ahmedinejad is scaring the Israelis and working up a good bluster. That's how he distracts people from Iran's domestic troubles.
Anyway, the idea of a military strike on Iran is, I think, a mental illness. Delusions of grandeur (the idea that you can WIN) mixed with psychotic paranoia (TEH MUSLINS AR WECOMING FOR US.)
Whenever I try to guess at what will happen, I ask myself what could be the most destructive, most humiliating possible course for our bold leaders to take. And that's what they do, nine times out of ten. Israel WILL attack Iran, it WILL be a catastrophe without parallel in history, Israel WILL be wiped out like the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and America WILL see all of its Middle Eastern armies vanish like noontime fog.
You are a dangerously suicidal maniac with a chronic inability to distinguish between a) people responsible for 9/11 and b) people not responsible for 9/11
You are really tired of life in a successful, first world country aren't you? How about instead of committing Anglophone forces to an attack on Iran, we send you PERSONALLY to deal with what you feel is an existential threat? We'll give you a dozen grenades and an M-16 and drop you in the Iranian desert to protect Israel from the Mad Mullahs. As for me, I don't imagine that Iran poses any relevant threat except that we attack. In which case they'll kill EVERY US soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan. See if they don't. Supply lines to Kabul are already stretched and under siege. All the techno-superiority in the world doesn't operate without fuel. You better believe Iranian commanders have been watching our "progress" in Iraq and Afghaninstan and are having a good laugh over it. You'd better believe that they have spies under every manhole cover in Iraq. They know where every US base is in Iraq, how we supply our soldiers, when and where their patrols are, and when our soldiers take a shit. They know EVERYTHING about Iraq, and that is where they will retaliate.
You people have the collective memory of a goldfish. An attack on Iran would be a world-scale catastrophe that would destroy Israel, ruin most of the Middle East with revolution and war, finish off America's gutted economy, and collapse anglophone hegemony FOREVER. Afghanistan and Iraq were never military threats, but Iran IS and some people don't recognize it. Just because they're brown doesn't mean they're weak and undisciplined.
I'm glad so many American soldiers died in World War II to bring true prosperity and freedom to the German people... bwahha. Sorry, couldn't keep a straight face. My nuts to Angela Merkel and her repressive fascist government.
If I were a German, I'd keep a Nazi flag in my window for the sole purpose of causing trouble, not because I agree with it or anything. Freedom of speech is for EVERYBODY, not just upper middle class suburbanites without a single contrarian opinion or brain in their heads.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/dogs-nazi-salute-lands-owner-in-jail-for-five-months-766438.html Heil-ing dog owner gets five years in jail. What a waste of taxpayer money. What are the chances of this dude being LESS Nazi-loving when he gets out of jail? Now he's a persecuted minority.
Next he needs to film the Silmarillion. I expect at least two movies, possibly up to three. Needs more Valar.
The two trees, Uglinaut, the duel between Melkor and Feanor, the fall of Numenor... it would kick ass.
Records of contact with ET's goes back throughout recorded history. Gods, djinn, faeries, demons, incubi, UFOs - the human mind is preconfigured to have experiences of extraterrestrial / extradimensional contact. I think that looking for large, fast travelling metal things broadcasting radio waves is not the way to discover other intelligent life. We've been surrounded by intelligent life from the very beginning, but we've been trained to ignore and denigrate reports of contact. I think when we finally acknowledge that we've had contact with "aliens," it will be a matter of validating an experience as old as human kind. For the untrained, DMT is an excellent way to discover that the intelligent life outside of ourselves does not exist on OUR terms.
We know for a fact that the universe we see isn't the whole universe - ie; the subject of the Hubble Volume. The universe seems to me to grow eternally in relation to the subtlety of the instruments we use to regard it.
For the record, everything about Big Bang cosmogony references redshift as being a property of distance. There does not explain several celestial objects where a high redshift object is physically connected to a low-redshift object. I have heard an alternate theory that redshift is a property of age rather than distance.
I would be truly astonished if the End of Greatness was a real phenomenon, and not just an artifact of the lack of refinement the observational instruments currently available.
They're junk because they require wholly imaginary particles and celestial objects to work. They're junk because they virtually ignore the mechanics of the celestial objects we ARE familiar with. They're junk because they're based on mathematical models and not observations made in the external world.
Why is it believed that galaxies formed only in the early universe? Personally, I find a picture of the universe that has a definite beginning to be a form of stealth creationism. Everything we know about nature is cyclical, always changing, reproducing, and eternal. It's easy for people to accept that the universe has no "center" but most people still cling to the idea that it has a beginning. I think stars and galaxies are life-forms which have defined stages and which reproduce. Funny that ~99% of the universe is supposed to be invisible, yet-to-me-detected forms of strange matter when we don't even have a basic understanding of the 99% of matter which we CAN see - that is, plasma.
Thinking of all galaxies as being old just fits into a paradigm of ignorance which defines modern cosmogony. Nobody knows what gravity is or how it operates. The gravity wave detectors they sent up detected a whole lot of nothing. In space, we're told, there are "frozen" magnetic fields not induced by electric currents. I have a suspicion that the only good thing we've gotten out of astrophysics for the past 50 years is observational data - the theories, at least, are junk.
But your more primitive sections of your brain can't tell the difference between fiction and reality. What you see is REAL to parts of your brain; that's why you get jacked up on adrenaline while playing an action game. When I played Doom or Duke Nukem, I relished every kill with glee. But I felt a little uncomfortable playing GTA:IV, and I almost turned off Fallout 3 after seeing a chunk of jawbone flying at me in full HD. I think there will be a point where it's so realistic I don't want to participate anymore. I'm not squeamish or a prude, but there's just things I don't want to see and have dreams about that night.
Last night as a matter of fact I dreamed I was on a pier being shot at by soldiers. I busted out a Fat Man and launched a nuke, then picked up a discarded machine gun as bullets pinged around me. That's a lot of realism and experiences I don't necessarily want to have whether awake or asleep.
The thing is, they DIDN'T see a black hole swallowing a star. They saw a massive burst of radiation. But they describe NOT what they actually observed, but their interpretation of what they observed instead. Are there no other possible sources for massive bursts of radiation than black holes swallowing stars? Given the aberrant numbers of high energy particles entering our star system, I would say it's premature indeed.
Same with the neutron stars, or pulsars allegedly being stars that "rotate faster than dentist drills." The impossible is far more likely than the improbable.
I have the Wii version and it took me about 2 dozen tries to get through the 5x Bloom sequence Mr. Orange has you do in the beginning of the game. I was ready to put the game down for good within the first thirty minutes, which doesn't speak well of it. It was way too picky about shape and positioning IMO. On the other hand, Resident Evil 4 on the Wii is an incredibly satisfying experience; something about manually lining up those headshots with the 'mote makes me giddy.
http://www.amazon.com/Churchill-Hitler-Unnecessary-War-Britain/dp/030740515X
Hitler, Churchill, and the Unnecessary War
WWII is more controversial now than ever, and I am convinced we did (mostly) wrong things in order to win. Just ask the victims of Dresden, or Hiroshima. The only difference between Guernica and Dresden is who's writing.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html Nerds are unpopular because they are pricks. Some of the meanest, most vicious and petty people I have ever met were the ones who were intelligent and well-educated.
You're mistaken. The American people don't object to the killing or abuse of their OWN people either. It is well known that American prisons are full of non-violent druggies subjected to rape, torture, and all forms of sexual violence. Instead of a national outcry against this, it is treated as a subject for late-night humor. When blacks in Oakland protest against a black boy having been murdered, shot point blank in the back while restrained on the BART - most Americans were angry at the PROTESTORS and cheered when the police fired tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse them. Americans will only become angry when it is a friend, neighbor, or family member who is abused. Anyone else and it becomes ENTERTAINMENT. The show "Cops" exists as a voyeuristic corruption of the justice system which is obviously based on the court room in Idiocracy.
The American people were the goose who laid the golden egg. We created so much technological innovation and such fine products at such low prices that the parasite of government couldn't resist. They bled us slowly, little by little. Income tax, social security (which my generation won't see a dime of,) state income tax, sales tax, property tax, emissions tax, tax and fees on everything. They drained the productivity of the American worker for decades, but we were so strong that we could feed the parasite and ourselves. But now we are drained dry and dying, the government is throttling the golden goose screaming for more money. There is no more money. I fear that soon the government will openly attack and beat the golden goose, using violence to try to coerce us into producing even more for their use when we are tapped out. The use of LRAD on protestors and tasers on lippy grandmothers will become even more widespread, mark my words.
the Truth does not care about how it is modded. it stands for itself and justifies itself against the mob.
What people refuse to understand is that our lives are no more important to our benevolent government than the lives of the ragheads in the mountains of Waziristan. Do you really think Obama cares about YOU? he doesn't care about human life in Pakistan or Iraq, why should he care about human life in Detriot or San Diego? The moment it becomes more profitable to have you dead than alive from the view of the US gov't, they will find a justification to be rid of you. At Waco they used army equipment against people who had committed NO CRIMES. If we do not speak out about the lives of civilians in these far-flung nations these drones will be used against us next.
I'm permabanned from Fark. :)
By its own definition, the US government is a terrorist regime. It utilizes violence to try to effect political change in other nations. According to Army Counterinsurgency Handbook (authored in part by Gen. Patraeus,) that is a defining characteristic of terrorist entities. The Taliban didn't attack us on 9/11... a bunch of Saudi Arabians, based in Florida and European nations, attacked us on 9/11. The Taliban offered to turn over Bin Ladin upon receipt of evidence that he was responsible for the attacks. The US Gov't refused. Today, EVERYONE responsible for 9/11 is DEAD or JAILED, and the US is waging ceaseless terrorist attacks on the Pashtun ethnic group of Pakistan and Afghanistan for NO APPARENT REASON. The usage of terrorist drone strikes, which have killed hundreds if not thousands of non-combatants this year, represents the kind of cowardice nominally associated with the BRAVE fighters of the so-called Taliban which resist the alien occupation of their country.
If it is secret why do you know about it? Why did they declare it to the IAEA? This is the opposite of secret. This is the reverse of secret. This is not secrecy. A secret is something you don't declare to the world.
1. Iran and Al-Queda are officially at war. 2. Iran is not Sunni, Al-Queda is Wahhabi a subset of Sunni Islam. It's like claiming that the United States is responsible for terrorism in Ireland because both nations are Christian. It is an inherently racist claim and ignores a huge amount of non-trivial distinction between Iranians and Saudi Arabian Arabs. 3. There are no good and peaceful Arabs. There is no good and peaceful collective of people anywhere. All the good and peaceful races were wiped out by evil and warlike races. 4. Israel attacks and is under attack. No moral high ground there. 5. Iran and Syria have long had enough VX to wipe out all of Israel and not used it. Nuclear weapons are a scare tactic; they have long held sufficient WMDs if they were truly suicidal. 6. Lines in the sand are not a pragmatic strategic decision.
There is no evidence that they are NOT following the rules. It is only speculation. Personally, I think that Iran already has nuclear weapons purchased from Pakistan in exchange for missile tech. It's a moot point anyway; Iran is good friends with Syria and Syria has enough chemical weapons and nerve agents to make Fallout 3 come true. Nuclear weapons aren't nearly as frightening to me as VX, and the Iranian-Syrian alliance has had neurotoxin in sufficient quantities to wipe out Israel for some time, and not used it. The bread and butter for Ahmedinejad is scaring the Israelis and working up a good bluster. That's how he distracts people from Iran's domestic troubles. Anyway, the idea of a military strike on Iran is, I think, a mental illness. Delusions of grandeur (the idea that you can WIN) mixed with psychotic paranoia (TEH MUSLINS AR WECOMING FOR US.) Whenever I try to guess at what will happen, I ask myself what could be the most destructive, most humiliating possible course for our bold leaders to take. And that's what they do, nine times out of ten. Israel WILL attack Iran, it WILL be a catastrophe without parallel in history, Israel WILL be wiped out like the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and America WILL see all of its Middle Eastern armies vanish like noontime fog.
You are a dangerously suicidal maniac with a chronic inability to distinguish between a) people responsible for 9/11 and b) people not responsible for 9/11
You are really tired of life in a successful, first world country aren't you? How about instead of committing Anglophone forces to an attack on Iran, we send you PERSONALLY to deal with what you feel is an existential threat? We'll give you a dozen grenades and an M-16 and drop you in the Iranian desert to protect Israel from the Mad Mullahs. As for me, I don't imagine that Iran poses any relevant threat except that we attack. In which case they'll kill EVERY US soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan. See if they don't. Supply lines to Kabul are already stretched and under siege. All the techno-superiority in the world doesn't operate without fuel. You better believe Iranian commanders have been watching our "progress" in Iraq and Afghaninstan and are having a good laugh over it. You'd better believe that they have spies under every manhole cover in Iraq. They know where every US base is in Iraq, how we supply our soldiers, when and where their patrols are, and when our soldiers take a shit. They know EVERYTHING about Iraq, and that is where they will retaliate.
http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=7606&IBLOCK_ID=35 Gary Brecher, the War Nerd, is the best military analyst there is these days, and he's written several articles about what an unprecedented f-up this is going to be
You people have the collective memory of a goldfish. An attack on Iran would be a world-scale catastrophe that would destroy Israel, ruin most of the Middle East with revolution and war, finish off America's gutted economy, and collapse anglophone hegemony FOREVER. Afghanistan and Iraq were never military threats, but Iran IS and some people don't recognize it. Just because they're brown doesn't mean they're weak and undisciplined.
I'm glad so many American soldiers died in World War II to bring true prosperity and freedom to the German people... bwahha. Sorry, couldn't keep a straight face. My nuts to Angela Merkel and her repressive fascist government. If I were a German, I'd keep a Nazi flag in my window for the sole purpose of causing trouble, not because I agree with it or anything. Freedom of speech is for EVERYBODY, not just upper middle class suburbanites without a single contrarian opinion or brain in their heads. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/dogs-nazi-salute-lands-owner-in-jail-for-five-months-766438.html Heil-ing dog owner gets five years in jail. What a waste of taxpayer money. What are the chances of this dude being LESS Nazi-loving when he gets out of jail? Now he's a persecuted minority.
Next he needs to film the Silmarillion. I expect at least two movies, possibly up to three. Needs more Valar. The two trees, Uglinaut, the duel between Melkor and Feanor, the fall of Numenor... it would kick ass.
Records of contact with ET's goes back throughout recorded history. Gods, djinn, faeries, demons, incubi, UFOs - the human mind is preconfigured to have experiences of extraterrestrial / extradimensional contact. I think that looking for large, fast travelling metal things broadcasting radio waves is not the way to discover other intelligent life. We've been surrounded by intelligent life from the very beginning, but we've been trained to ignore and denigrate reports of contact. I think when we finally acknowledge that we've had contact with "aliens," it will be a matter of validating an experience as old as human kind. For the untrained, DMT is an excellent way to discover that the intelligent life outside of ourselves does not exist on OUR terms.
We know for a fact that the universe we see isn't the whole universe - ie; the subject of the Hubble Volume. The universe seems to me to grow eternally in relation to the subtlety of the instruments we use to regard it.
For the record, everything about Big Bang cosmogony references redshift as being a property of distance. There does not explain several celestial objects where a high redshift object is physically connected to a low-redshift object. I have heard an alternate theory that redshift is a property of age rather than distance.
I would be truly astonished if the End of Greatness was a real phenomenon, and not just an artifact of the lack of refinement the observational instruments currently available.
They're junk because they require wholly imaginary particles and celestial objects to work. They're junk because they virtually ignore the mechanics of the celestial objects we ARE familiar with. They're junk because they're based on mathematical models and not observations made in the external world.
Why is it believed that galaxies formed only in the early universe? Personally, I find a picture of the universe that has a definite beginning to be a form of stealth creationism. Everything we know about nature is cyclical, always changing, reproducing, and eternal. It's easy for people to accept that the universe has no "center" but most people still cling to the idea that it has a beginning. I think stars and galaxies are life-forms which have defined stages and which reproduce. Funny that ~99% of the universe is supposed to be invisible, yet-to-me-detected forms of strange matter when we don't even have a basic understanding of the 99% of matter which we CAN see - that is, plasma. Thinking of all galaxies as being old just fits into a paradigm of ignorance which defines modern cosmogony. Nobody knows what gravity is or how it operates. The gravity wave detectors they sent up detected a whole lot of nothing. In space, we're told, there are "frozen" magnetic fields not induced by electric currents. I have a suspicion that the only good thing we've gotten out of astrophysics for the past 50 years is observational data - the theories, at least, are junk.
But your more primitive sections of your brain can't tell the difference between fiction and reality. What you see is REAL to parts of your brain; that's why you get jacked up on adrenaline while playing an action game. When I played Doom or Duke Nukem, I relished every kill with glee. But I felt a little uncomfortable playing GTA:IV, and I almost turned off Fallout 3 after seeing a chunk of jawbone flying at me in full HD. I think there will be a point where it's so realistic I don't want to participate anymore. I'm not squeamish or a prude, but there's just things I don't want to see and have dreams about that night. Last night as a matter of fact I dreamed I was on a pier being shot at by soldiers. I busted out a Fat Man and launched a nuke, then picked up a discarded machine gun as bullets pinged around me. That's a lot of realism and experiences I don't necessarily want to have whether awake or asleep.
Submitting to authority does not protect you from them.
The thing is, they DIDN'T see a black hole swallowing a star. They saw a massive burst of radiation. But they describe NOT what they actually observed, but their interpretation of what they observed instead. Are there no other possible sources for massive bursts of radiation than black holes swallowing stars? Given the aberrant numbers of high energy particles entering our star system, I would say it's premature indeed. Same with the neutron stars, or pulsars allegedly being stars that "rotate faster than dentist drills." The impossible is far more likely than the improbable.
I have the Wii version and it took me about 2 dozen tries to get through the 5x Bloom sequence Mr. Orange has you do in the beginning of the game. I was ready to put the game down for good within the first thirty minutes, which doesn't speak well of it. It was way too picky about shape and positioning IMO. On the other hand, Resident Evil 4 on the Wii is an incredibly satisfying experience; something about manually lining up those headshots with the 'mote makes me giddy.
http://www.amazon.com/Churchill-Hitler-Unnecessary-War-Britain/dp/030740515X Hitler, Churchill, and the Unnecessary War WWII is more controversial now than ever, and I am convinced we did (mostly) wrong things in order to win. Just ask the victims of Dresden, or Hiroshima. The only difference between Guernica and Dresden is who's writing.