Here's one you never hear: I'm homeless because I'm living off the grid. No state ID, no SS#, no income taxes. I've researched far too much about what the federal government is doing to subsidize it. That would be treason on my part. You don't feed the monster that bites you and other people as well.
If everyone made that decision, we'd find the federal government would shape up PDQ out of sheer necessity.
It's a tough choice to make, and it shorts me rather than me shorting other people, but at least you can sleep at night. When the crowds getting out of the bars at 2 am aren't yelling too loud, that is.
I've been on the street for a decade. Trust me, the homeless shelters typically have become stacked with corrupt management in a position to monopolize homeless access to necessary resources. As a result, complaints about the corruption seldom get very far, and it's able to continue. It's tough to alert people to corruption when you're threatened with denial of access to food for a week. My solution was to Google the e-mail addresses of the Board of Directors. These guys typically get about a half-hour of facetime a week with the senior manager of their homeless shelter, and so they seldom get to hear about what actually goes on there. Once they found out, they started making inquiries to the other homeless clients and it all started coming out.
I'm sure there are homeless services centers where the management personnel are angels. But it rarely happens. Usually they're just out for salaries and subsidy monies - and a lot of it disappears down an invisible drain somewhere. It's easy when there's no accountability.
I may not have been clear. Imagine a Google Payment API. As with Drupal, developers could write all sorts of applications that made it extensible to various payment methods and services. Customers would have the option - of course - and all merchants would do is use Google's API. At checkout, a customer would select the widget or icon that represented services he used.
Thus, all merchants would offer the same payment methods: everything that developers had enabled Google's system to connect to.
That's a little bit out of context, don't you think?
No, I just think it doesn't fit the context that's traditionally been ascribed to them. It doesn't fit the role we built our government to perform, and given what it's been doing I think it's important to keep close tabs on that.
They didn't develop Keyhole as some kind of subsidy for industry. They did it so they could take pictures of Russian nuclear facilities from space etc.
My belief is that the Cold War was a primer to subsidize all manner of covert technology and nuclear buildup for other purposes. A bit like 9/11 making a great excuse to pull rights away from American citizens wholesale, or how claims of nuclear development on Iran's part generates a pretext to bully militarily-weak oil-producing countries (never mind that nuclear enrichment, according to insiders, is essentially an obsolete concern these days), or S. 1867 officially making the country a military dictatorship. It's not what you hear the media saying is the pretext for all this stuff, but it's an emergent pattern that certainly passes the Duck Test.
It turns out that it, like the internet and GPS, have civilian uses as well.
And how convenient it must be for a government to extract tax monies from the people by force - for, at the end of the day that's what underlies governments - decide what to spend it on, and then be able to profit hugely by releasing some of that to industries, steering the industry itself while corporations are used to create government-friendly structures that cannot directly be created by the federal government.
Would you rather that they spent your money and then just kept all that stuff still classified?
Don't get why you're somehow trying to pass off this fact as a negative, the OTS - CIA's technical division, known by a number of other initialisms in the past, and their Sciences and technology division have been a driving force in the field of electronics and communications for a long, long time.
No argument on that point, and there have been phenomenal boons from it. But it's usurpation.
Consider: It's been a taxpayer-funded driving force. The industry, in other words, has been getting the leavings of publicly-funded covert research. Industry takes whatever's left over.
Market demand is supposed to drive industry. What people actually want, rather than what's been vacuumed out of their back pockets by their government, and what their government then decides it feels inclined to declassify.
PayPal is in the middle of their third class-action lawsuit for making it easy to start using their service, then freezing your account, demanding all sorts of identifying info they'd never said up-front they'd need (a utility bill that "must be in your name"? I don't get one.) and demanding that you justify to them all the transactions you've been involved with. Meanwhile, they're earning interest off of all the funds that have been frozen.
A California court ruled ages ago that they cannot include the term in their EULA stipulating that customers agree not to have access to a real court, and must instead seek resolution through an internal Dispute Resolution Team comprised of PayPal's employees, whose word is "final". The term remains in their EULA despite the court decision that it would mislead customers into thinking they didn't have access to a real court anymore.
Google has major connections with In-Q-Tel, the CIA's corporate investment arm. When the CIA wants to market technologies it has developed with taxpayer money, it puts them on the private market through In-Q-Tel. The CIA's Keyhole technology became known to us as... Google Earth. Facebook also has serious In-Q-Tel connections. There appears to be a lot of these companies working with the Information Awareness Office, who openly states its efforts to compile online information online on citizens in a centralized government database. Note that Google has placed itself as the free information service leader. Put your contacts list, your spreadsheets, and anything else you've got on Google's various free services. How convenient.
Google's "Don't be evil." slogan hearkens back to the Bohemian Grove's ("Weaving spiders come not here") as well as a rich, ancient tradition of invoking evil and other dark, malevolent symbols by attaching the concept of "not" to them and calling it good. This has been done for centuries in magickal lore and storytelling, using charms against various nasty things as a means of invoking that specific thing in a socially-acceptable way. Magickally, you call upon something by invoking the concept - and specifying "not [this]" is as much an invocation as saying "[this]". Among those who use this convention, it becomes a subtle form of calling card and social identifier to one another. It's been used for centuries.
Why is that? We have a theory, and we see them deliberately attempting to emulate Apple's [financial] success by locking in their customer base. We may think we know, but for most people it's still an open question.
They might think differently if they knew of Google's close association with In-Q-Tel, the CIA's corporate investment arm. But they don't, and it's more civilized to ask a question than rush to infer someone's intentional guilt.
Yeah, it's such an odd mentality: Refuse to make it easy for people to pay, in an effort to make their services an impulse aisle.
Do the majority of people really think like this? Money just flies out of their pockets because they habitually purchase things they don't actually want? I can get how that would disturb companies like Google, or site owners for that matter, but only if they fear that what they have isn't really of value. Seems to be costing them sales.
For all the good that Google is supposedly trying to do, this begs a question I've been wondering for quite a while.
Why don't they implement a Payment API for developers? People could then use all sorts of services, from PayPal to BitCoin to pay to Google, and be paid by them. Google doesn't implement all the extant services out there because if it implemented a few of them, it would be considered responsible for implementing all of them. But it would make sense to enable developers to do so, and customers to use them.
Or so it seemed. They appear to be more interested in restricting payment types in order to increase their margins. If this is so, it will diminish their user-base as this sort of thing comes out. Granted, they've found innovative economies of scale that have allowed them to do things it would be difficult for others to do as cheaply - which appears to be something they're now leveraging to put unfair leverage on the marketplace. A lack of effective competition becomes a monopolization.
In this case, it means "everyone else". Like when people think about their driving skill -- everyone else sucks.
It's the general public's psychological defense mechanism to dissociate from their own stupidity. The stupidity of others rampantly abounds and cannot escape their notice - therefore, they arrive at the conclusion that it's "everyone else" that's stupid, releasing themselves from all scrutiny and reinforcing their own illusory flawless self-image.
This of course only serves their comfort zone, apathy and perpetuates the very problem they were complaining about. The only alternative is to strive to do better themselves. (This almost never happens.)
If you are being monitored the police/... can still see who you are talking to even if they can't understand what you are saying.
In these days of S. 1867 having been passed, that's enough to have someone hauled off the street and detained indefinitely - no exaggeration. If you live in the U.S., all they need now is mere suspicion of being a terrorist - no charges made against you, just suspicion. And suspicion can be inferred whenever you associate with the wrong person over the internet. Suddenly the concept of legislation specifically to prevent file-sharing seems a little antiquated. The People have allowed the government to usurp too much control to worry about the specific minor threats anymore, when the larger legal catch-alls will do the job far more effectively.
If replacing fraudulent color of law with the system We, the People actually established is going to be called a teaching a catechism, I'm probably guilty. Knowing what our political system and system of laws actually are is quite a basic skill to have, and ignorance of it has been enabling all manner of corruption. To me, that's what's scary, or at least vexing.
Kind of a combination of Amway and Scientology.
Then by your reasoning, Paul Revere was a potentially great Amway salesman born too soon. Trippy.
Please don't attempt to make a grindhouse film out of efforts for patriotism and civic duty.
-- and there's no reason to believe they're not in "reality."
On what planet?
Have you seen what's left of the news lately? These are the people who elect and subsidize corrupt politicians, and then complain about them. Who idly tolerate 93 of 100 demonstrably treasonous Senators enacting legislation so unconstitutional, the military is now authorized to haul off U.S. citizens, decide whether or not the Constitution applies to them, hold them indefinitely, and torture a confession out of them. They're the people who, when they complain, complain instead about PIPA and SOPA because their prioritization is not to have their access to the Internet taken away instead. They're people who have for decades now accepted by default throwing a quarter to a third of their earnings to the government, half of which goes to the military. Their idea of a political solution is to put stickers on their cars that giddily and ineffectually prompt one another to "Impeach Bush" like they're naughty school children spreading gossip via classroom notes, and even then they don't actually do anything based on it. We now have drones patrolling the domestic U.S., and Posse Comitatus has been suspended while these people were paying for it while cooing over the Kardashians and the end of Oprah's daytime talk show. I'm not sure what you're basing your assessment on, but I've completely missed the humor in it.
There are a lot of comments on the Boy and Girl Scout associations, but not yet many on the use of online merit badges as an alternative educational model.
Imagine educational sites done easily in Drupal, in which users learned skills and knowledge sets about... well, anything. Skillsets disruptive to the status quo, for instance. Hacking. Encryption. True American Common Law. All manner of "disruptive" information. They could earn merit badges and level them up just as they do in an RPG, and display or link them on social networking sites and in their.sig files on sites like Slashdot. As they promoted their learning and interests, others would notice and learn about them as well if they found the material interesting. From there, it's not much of a stretch to imagine them getting together in online forums of interest groups. And then you'd have an alternative model of information distribution from the mainstream media. You'd also have a mechanism for giving people the skills they need to overcome the status quo.
As a bonus, geeks who created sites like that could charge users a negligible amount of BitCoins in monthly dues once they'd leveled past a certain point. The interesting part would be that the moment users became responsible for monthly dues, they would also be eligible for a portion of dues paid by any other new users they'd brought to the site. It would provide some great incentive for users to not only promote awareness by displaying the badges they'd earned, but also mentoring their recruits - thus assisting in the transmission of the information. Anyone doing that actively would find learning and teaching skills of interest to them online would be a sort of profit model, and that they were accruing far more from it than they were paying out.
By making it fun, easy, interesting and profitable, it would be very easy to imagine this model catching on among the mainstream Facebook crowd who are currently sitting around playing FarmVille instead. And thus, you'd have a means of bringing the mainstream back to reality and fixing society while making money for yourself in the process.
Very interesting. Sounds like you have a toolkit of skills to contend with the status quo. Are they detailed thoroughly somewhere? If not, I suggest writing something on HubPages or similar. People need to understand those tools in order to use them effectively.
I'd also like to recommend you take a look at the new content Is It Time For Hacker Scouts? I modded the story up from the Firehose because of its potential application to finishing off the status quo. Imagine educational sites done easily in Drupal, in which users learned skills and knowledge sets about... well, anything. The toolkit you seem to have, for instance. American Common Law. All manner of "disruptive" information. They could earn merit badges and level them up just as they do in an RPG, and display them on social networking sites and in their.sig files on sites like Slashdot. As they promoted their learning and interests, others would notice and learn about them as well if they found the material interesting. From there, it's not much of a stretch to imagine them getting together in online forums of interest groups. And then you'd have an alternative model of information distribution from the mainstream media. You'd also have a mechanism for giving people the skills they need to overcome the status quo.
As a bonus, geeks who created sites like that could charge users a negligible amount of BitCoins in monthly dues once they'd leveled past a certain point. The interesting part would be that the moment users became responsible for monthly dues, they would also be eligible for a portion of dues paid by any other new users they'd brought to the site. It would provide some great incentive for users to not only promote awareness by displaying the badges they'd earned, but also mentoring their recruits - thus assisting in the transmission of information. Anyone doing that actively would find learning and teaching skills of interest to them online would be a sort of profit model, and that they were accruing far more from it than they were paying out.
By making it fun, easy, interesting and profitable, it would be very feasible to imagine this model catching on among the mainstream Facebook crowd who are currently sitting around playing FarmVille instead. And thus, you'd have a means of bringing the mainstream back to reality. Another concept for your toolkit, and we have enough geeks here to get projects like this started. As you suggest, multiple strategies are required to be effective. Surely by a few geeks picking a project that appeals to them, the whole thing can be accomplished on a collective basis without an authoritarian structure to direct them individually.
Champerty and maintenance are doctrines in common law jurisdictions
and corporations, not to mention the corporate federal government operating outside its Constitutional capacity, are in the venue of commercial law instead. Secondly, those doctrines were established to prevent frivolous lawsuits - when it's clearly evident that in the case of the People - rather than the corporations - the opposite problem is true today. We have a vacuum of cases where the People take on corruption in the courts.
Because it's next to impossible to assert ones' rights in a society in which the People have all the assertive qualities of a bowlful of yogurt, and because it's a maxim of common law that, "The law provides no right without a remedy." (Ubi jus ibi remedium), the law really can't complain that the approach is designed to use the courts frivolously. It may piss off judges something fierce, but they tend to be kittycats when it comes to the People collectively demanding justice. The real only opportunity these attorneys who've outgrown the larval stage tend to have to act like courtroom tyrants is when the People have forgotten the law and slept on their rights, trusting whatever he says to have the full authority of law. That's coming to a close as well. The People, though still tentative at the moment, are waking up and learning their rights and authority once more.
Let us hope they also manage to relearn the principles of law before they fully waken, and start acting like bulls in a china shop.
To me as well. And while his wording is sensationalistic at times, his intel correctly anticipates various high-level arrests and political trends. I did say that as a source of intel, it was hardly ideal. However, it's the best I've come across.
While his geopolitics is generally accurate - despite over-the-top terms he uses to shorthand various groups - the geopolitical scenarios the world encounters are just so much paper-shuffling at a larger scale. But people can hardly be expected to sort their way through the larger morass until they've gotten through the overt and covert scenarios first. Fulford's site is the best site I'm aware of to do that.
I'm not anon, but I don't think you need a degree in psychiatry to conclude that's pretty far over the top.
I don't conclude that. I'll readily agree that it does sound over the top. Counterintuitively, for those who have background in these things the content Fulford presents doesn't seem that abnormal. It's more frequently people who haven't encountered things like this in their own experience that have their alarm bells set off by the seeming outlandishness of it all. It happens with many of the lesser-explored areas in life. Since neither I nor Fulford are to blame for that phenomenon, I don't feel the need to make excuses for it. The Gay Pride movement or the furry community probably seem just as odd to most people in Texas or Louisiana. It's a matter of familiarity, and while I understand and am tolerant of the lack of acceptance, I don't ascribe that as being due to any inherent invalidity of the subject matter.
But I do take mild exception to being irresponsibly insulted by an AnonyTroll. Which was why that was all he was getting, particularly when Fulford's information has been checking out so well. You made a specific point - even if it was only "This sounds pretty funky to me" - and that's valid discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's one you never hear: I'm homeless because I'm living off the grid. No state ID, no SS#, no income taxes. I've researched far too much about what the federal government is doing to subsidize it. That would be treason on my part. You don't feed the monster that bites you and other people as well.
If everyone made that decision, we'd find the federal government would shape up PDQ out of sheer necessity.
It's a tough choice to make, and it shorts me rather than me shorting other people, but at least you can sleep at night. When the crowds getting out of the bars at 2 am aren't yelling too loud, that is.
I've been on the street for a decade. Trust me, the homeless shelters typically have become stacked with corrupt management in a position to monopolize homeless access to necessary resources. As a result, complaints about the corruption seldom get very far, and it's able to continue. It's tough to alert people to corruption when you're threatened with denial of access to food for a week. My solution was to Google the e-mail addresses of the Board of Directors. These guys typically get about a half-hour of facetime a week with the senior manager of their homeless shelter, and so they seldom get to hear about what actually goes on there. Once they found out, they started making inquiries to the other homeless clients and it all started coming out.
I'm sure there are homeless services centers where the management personnel are angels. But it rarely happens. Usually they're just out for salaries and subsidy monies - and a lot of it disappears down an invisible drain somewhere. It's easy when there's no accountability.
Ugh, pwnies.
Life imitates pun.
I may not have been clear. Imagine a Google Payment API. As with Drupal, developers could write all sorts of applications that made it extensible to various payment methods and services. Customers would have the option - of course - and all merchants would do is use Google's API. At checkout, a customer would select the widget or icon that represented services he used.
Thus, all merchants would offer the same payment methods: everything that developers had enabled Google's system to connect to.
That's a little bit out of context, don't you think?
No, I just think it doesn't fit the context that's traditionally been ascribed to them. It doesn't fit the role we built our government to perform, and given what it's been doing I think it's important to keep close tabs on that.
They didn't develop Keyhole as some kind of subsidy for industry. They did it so they could take pictures of Russian nuclear facilities from space etc.
My belief is that the Cold War was a primer to subsidize all manner of covert technology and nuclear buildup for other purposes. A bit like 9/11 making a great excuse to pull rights away from American citizens wholesale, or how claims of nuclear development on Iran's part generates a pretext to bully militarily-weak oil-producing countries (never mind that nuclear enrichment, according to insiders, is essentially an obsolete concern these days), or S. 1867 officially making the country a military dictatorship. It's not what you hear the media saying is the pretext for all this stuff, but it's an emergent pattern that certainly passes the Duck Test.
It turns out that it, like the internet and GPS, have civilian uses as well.
And how convenient it must be for a government to extract tax monies from the people by force - for, at the end of the day that's what underlies governments - decide what to spend it on, and then be able to profit hugely by releasing some of that to industries, steering the industry itself while corporations are used to create government-friendly structures that cannot directly be created by the federal government.
Would you rather that they spent your money and then just kept all that stuff still classified?
Whose money?
Right.
Don't get why you're somehow trying to pass off this fact as a negative, the OTS - CIA's technical division, known by a number of other initialisms in the past, and their Sciences and technology division have been a driving force in the field of electronics and communications for a long, long time.
No argument on that point, and there have been phenomenal boons from it. But it's usurpation.
Consider: It's been a taxpayer-funded driving force. The industry, in other words, has been getting the leavings of publicly-funded covert research. Industry takes whatever's left over.
Market demand is supposed to drive industry. What people actually want, rather than what's been vacuumed out of their back pockets by their government, and what their government then decides it feels inclined to declassify.
PayPal is in the middle of their third class-action lawsuit for making it easy to start using their service, then freezing your account, demanding all sorts of identifying info they'd never said up-front they'd need (a utility bill that "must be in your name"? I don't get one.) and demanding that you justify to them all the transactions you've been involved with. Meanwhile, they're earning interest off of all the funds that have been frozen.
A California court ruled ages ago that they cannot include the term in their EULA stipulating that customers agree not to have access to a real court, and must instead seek resolution through an internal Dispute Resolution Team comprised of PayPal's employees, whose word is "final". The term remains in their EULA despite the court decision that it would mislead customers into thinking they didn't have access to a real court anymore.
Google has major connections with In-Q-Tel, the CIA's corporate investment arm. When the CIA wants to market technologies it has developed with taxpayer money, it puts them on the private market through In-Q-Tel. The CIA's Keyhole technology became known to us as... Google Earth. Facebook also has serious In-Q-Tel connections. There appears to be a lot of these companies working with the Information Awareness Office, who openly states its efforts to compile online information online on citizens in a centralized government database. Note that Google has placed itself as the free information service leader. Put your contacts list, your spreadsheets, and anything else you've got on Google's various free services. How convenient.
Google's "Don't be evil." slogan hearkens back to the Bohemian Grove's ("Weaving spiders come not here") as well as a rich, ancient tradition of invoking evil and other dark, malevolent symbols by attaching the concept of "not" to them and calling it good. This has been done for centuries in magickal lore and storytelling, using charms against various nasty things as a means of invoking that specific thing in a socially-acceptable way. Magickally, you call upon something by invoking the concept - and specifying "not [this]" is as much an invocation as saying "[this]". Among those who use this convention, it becomes a subtle form of calling card and social identifier to one another. It's been used for centuries.
Ah. Thank you.
It doesn't beg a question at all.
Why is that? We have a theory, and we see them deliberately attempting to emulate Apple's [financial] success by locking in their customer base. We may think we know, but for most people it's still an open question.
They might think differently if they knew of Google's close association with In-Q-Tel, the CIA's corporate investment arm. But they don't, and it's more civilized to ask a question than rush to infer someone's intentional guilt.
Yeah, it's such an odd mentality: Refuse to make it easy for people to pay, in an effort to make their services an impulse aisle.
Do the majority of people really think like this? Money just flies out of their pockets because they habitually purchase things they don't actually want? I can get how that would disturb companies like Google, or site owners for that matter, but only if they fear that what they have isn't really of value. Seems to be costing them sales.
For all the good that Google is supposedly trying to do, this begs a question I've been wondering for quite a while.
Why don't they implement a Payment API for developers? People could then use all sorts of services, from PayPal to BitCoin to pay to Google, and be paid by them. Google doesn't implement all the extant services out there because if it implemented a few of them, it would be considered responsible for implementing all of them. But it would make sense to enable developers to do so, and customers to use them.
Or so it seemed. They appear to be more interested in restricting payment types in order to increase their margins. If this is so, it will diminish their user-base as this sort of thing comes out. Granted, they've found innovative economies of scale that have allowed them to do things it would be difficult for others to do as cheaply - which appears to be something they're now leveraging to put unfair leverage on the marketplace. A lack of effective competition becomes a monopolization.
One of the things I loved about Real Genius was how much of the science (aside from the hacking parts) made perfect sense.
"Is that liquid nitrogen?"
"Despite the fact that it's solid, yes. Yes, it is."
... I'm surprised anyone would publish the findings without an explanation for this.
Didn't people used to do that all the time? They called it Science.
In this case, it means "everyone else". Like when people think about their driving skill -- everyone else sucks.
It's the general public's psychological defense mechanism to dissociate from their own stupidity. The stupidity of others rampantly abounds and cannot escape their notice - therefore, they arrive at the conclusion that it's "everyone else" that's stupid, releasing themselves from all scrutiny and reinforcing their own illusory flawless self-image.
This of course only serves their comfort zone, apathy and perpetuates the very problem they were complaining about. The only alternative is to strive to do better themselves. (This almost never happens.)
Images purporting to show what TSA scanners actually get have been demonstrated to be fakes:
http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=154635.0
If you are being monitored the police/... can still see who you are talking to even if they can't understand what you are saying.
In these days of S. 1867 having been passed, that's enough to have someone hauled off the street and detained indefinitely - no exaggeration. If you live in the U.S., all they need now is mere suspicion of being a terrorist - no charges made against you, just suspicion. And suspicion can be inferred whenever you associate with the wrong person over the internet. Suddenly the concept of legislation specifically to prevent file-sharing seems a little antiquated. The People have allowed the government to usurp too much control to worry about the specific minor threats anymore, when the larger legal catch-alls will do the job far more effectively.
True American Common Law, whatever that is
Glad you asked.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_United_States#American_common_law
Alternatively, here is the Advanced Law Substitute they're using today.
If replacing fraudulent color of law with the system We, the People actually established is going to be called a teaching a catechism, I'm probably guilty. Knowing what our political system and system of laws actually are is quite a basic skill to have, and ignorance of it has been enabling all manner of corruption. To me, that's what's scary, or at least vexing.
Kind of a combination of Amway and Scientology.
Then by your reasoning, Paul Revere was a potentially great Amway salesman born too soon. Trippy.
Please don't attempt to make a grindhouse film out of efforts for patriotism and civic duty.
-- and there's no reason to believe they're not in "reality."
On what planet?
Have you seen what's left of the news lately? These are the people who elect and subsidize corrupt politicians, and then complain about them. Who idly tolerate 93 of 100 demonstrably treasonous Senators enacting legislation so unconstitutional, the military is now authorized to haul off U.S. citizens, decide whether or not the Constitution applies to them, hold them indefinitely, and torture a confession out of them. They're the people who, when they complain, complain instead about PIPA and SOPA because their prioritization is not to have their access to the Internet taken away instead. They're people who have for decades now accepted by default throwing a quarter to a third of their earnings to the government, half of which goes to the military. Their idea of a political solution is to put stickers on their cars that giddily and ineffectually prompt one another to "Impeach Bush" like they're naughty school children spreading gossip via classroom notes, and even then they don't actually do anything based on it. We now have drones patrolling the domestic U.S., and Posse Comitatus has been suspended while these people were paying for it while cooing over the Kardashians and the end of Oprah's daytime talk show. I'm not sure what you're basing your assessment on, but I've completely missed the humor in it.
There are a lot of comments on the Boy and Girl Scout associations, but not yet many on the use of online merit badges as an alternative educational model.
Imagine educational sites done easily in Drupal, in which users learned skills and knowledge sets about... well, anything. Skillsets disruptive to the status quo, for instance. Hacking. Encryption. True American Common Law. All manner of "disruptive" information. They could earn merit badges and level them up just as they do in an RPG, and display or link them on social networking sites and in their .sig files on sites like Slashdot. As they promoted their learning and interests, others would notice and learn about them as well if they found the material interesting. From there, it's not much of a stretch to imagine them getting together in online forums of interest groups. And then you'd have an alternative model of information distribution from the mainstream media. You'd also have a mechanism for giving people the skills they need to overcome the status quo.
As a bonus, geeks who created sites like that could charge users a negligible amount of BitCoins in monthly dues once they'd leveled past a certain point. The interesting part would be that the moment users became responsible for monthly dues, they would also be eligible for a portion of dues paid by any other new users they'd brought to the site. It would provide some great incentive for users to not only promote awareness by displaying the badges they'd earned, but also mentoring their recruits - thus assisting in the transmission of the information. Anyone doing that actively would find learning and teaching skills of interest to them online would be a sort of profit model, and that they were accruing far more from it than they were paying out.
By making it fun, easy, interesting and profitable, it would be very easy to imagine this model catching on among the mainstream Facebook crowd who are currently sitting around playing FarmVille instead. And thus, you'd have a means of bringing the mainstream back to reality and fixing society while making money for yourself in the process.
Very interesting. Sounds like you have a toolkit of skills to contend with the status quo. Are they detailed thoroughly somewhere? If not, I suggest writing something on HubPages or similar. People need to understand those tools in order to use them effectively.
I'd also like to recommend you take a look at the new content Is It Time For Hacker Scouts? I modded the story up from the Firehose because of its potential application to finishing off the status quo. Imagine educational sites done easily in Drupal, in which users learned skills and knowledge sets about... well, anything. The toolkit you seem to have, for instance. American Common Law. All manner of "disruptive" information. They could earn merit badges and level them up just as they do in an RPG, and display them on social networking sites and in their .sig files on sites like Slashdot. As they promoted their learning and interests, others would notice and learn about them as well if they found the material interesting. From there, it's not much of a stretch to imagine them getting together in online forums of interest groups. And then you'd have an alternative model of information distribution from the mainstream media. You'd also have a mechanism for giving people the skills they need to overcome the status quo.
As a bonus, geeks who created sites like that could charge users a negligible amount of BitCoins in monthly dues once they'd leveled past a certain point. The interesting part would be that the moment users became responsible for monthly dues, they would also be eligible for a portion of dues paid by any other new users they'd brought to the site. It would provide some great incentive for users to not only promote awareness by displaying the badges they'd earned, but also mentoring their recruits - thus assisting in the transmission of information. Anyone doing that actively would find learning and teaching skills of interest to them online would be a sort of profit model, and that they were accruing far more from it than they were paying out.
By making it fun, easy, interesting and profitable, it would be very feasible to imagine this model catching on among the mainstream Facebook crowd who are currently sitting around playing FarmVille instead. And thus, you'd have a means of bringing the mainstream back to reality. Another concept for your toolkit, and we have enough geeks here to get projects like this started. As you suggest, multiple strategies are required to be effective. Surely by a few geeks picking a project that appeals to them, the whole thing can be accomplished on a collective basis without an authoritarian structure to direct them individually.
First, thank you kindly for the information!
Not to worry though. Primarily because
Champerty and maintenance are doctrines in common law jurisdictions
and corporations, not to mention the corporate federal government operating outside its Constitutional capacity, are in the venue of commercial law instead. Secondly, those doctrines were established to prevent frivolous lawsuits - when it's clearly evident that in the case of the People - rather than the corporations - the opposite problem is true today. We have a vacuum of cases where the People take on corruption in the courts.
Because it's next to impossible to assert ones' rights in a society in which the People have all the assertive qualities of a bowlful of yogurt, and because it's a maxim of common law that, "The law provides no right without a remedy." (Ubi jus ibi remedium), the law really can't complain that the approach is designed to use the courts frivolously. It may piss off judges something fierce, but they tend to be kittycats when it comes to the People collectively demanding justice. The real only opportunity these attorneys who've outgrown the larval stage tend to have to act like courtroom tyrants is when the People have forgotten the law and slept on their rights, trusting whatever he says to have the full authority of law. That's coming to a close as well. The People, though still tentative at the moment, are waking up and learning their rights and authority once more.
Let us hope they also manage to relearn the principles of law before they fully waken, and start acting like bulls in a china shop.
That would be an interesting claim to file. "They stole my bits! I demand that you replace them."
The RIAA, MPAA and Microsoft have been doing it for years now.
So I take it we're back on the BitCoin thing full-time?
Does this mean that we at least don't have to see anything about Raspberry Pie or Strawberry Jam, or whatever, for a few weeks?
I hope you don't also bury your relatives before they're dead.
That sounds pretty out there to me.
To me as well. And while his wording is sensationalistic at times, his intel correctly anticipates various high-level arrests and political trends. I did say that as a source of intel, it was hardly ideal. However, it's the best I've come across.
While his geopolitics is generally accurate - despite over-the-top terms he uses to shorthand various groups - the geopolitical scenarios the world encounters are just so much paper-shuffling at a larger scale. But people can hardly be expected to sort their way through the larger morass until they've gotten through the overt and covert scenarios first. Fulford's site is the best site I'm aware of to do that.
I'm not anon, but I don't think you need a degree in psychiatry to conclude that's pretty far over the top.
I don't conclude that. I'll readily agree that it does sound over the top. Counterintuitively, for those who have background in these things the content Fulford presents doesn't seem that abnormal. It's more frequently people who haven't encountered things like this in their own experience that have their alarm bells set off by the seeming outlandishness of it all. It happens with many of the lesser-explored areas in life. Since neither I nor Fulford are to blame for that phenomenon, I don't feel the need to make excuses for it. The Gay Pride movement or the furry community probably seem just as odd to most people in Texas or Louisiana. It's a matter of familiarity, and while I understand and am tolerant of the lack of acceptance, I don't ascribe that as being due to any inherent invalidity of the subject matter.
But I do take mild exception to being irresponsibly insulted by an AnonyTroll. Which was why that was all he was getting, particularly when Fulford's information has been checking out so well. You made a specific point - even if it was only "This sounds pretty funky to me" - and that's valid discussion.
I'm delighted to see they're giving Doctorates in Psychiatry to Anonymous Cowards these days.