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1 pound smoked bacon 530 calories.

1 big mac 580 calories.

apparently the Atkins diet has nothing to do with carbs, but in making it impossible to eat as many calories as you can with junk food without throwing up.  (note for those about to embark on a bacon diet knowing this, the non smoked bacon, which is much fattier, clocks in at double the calories).

The biggest shock? Instead of seeing a greater reliance on long-term incentive programs, the Reda report found that changes in these companies' plans made short-term incentive pay a bigger part of the compensation pie. Let me say that again: The plans — despite the calamities that short-term profiteering has visited on our economy — made short-term incentives a bigger component of compensation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/business/16gret.html?_r=1&ref=business

[natural born citizen]

I was flipping through the constitution and came across this.

No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty five years, and been fourteen Years a resident within the United States.

Which means the birthers are crazy from the word 'go'.  Even if Obama was really born in Kenya, his mother is from Kansas, and under US law anybody born to an American citizen is a Natural born citizen themselves.

Why the hell are we even arguing about the birth certificate, we should be beating them over the head with a copy of the constitution.

Were the republicans as crazy back then too?  Or is this a whole new world of opposition party insanity?

http://washingtonindependent.com/54674/eight-percent-of-north-carolinians-dont-consider-hawaii-part-of-the-united-states

Apparently we kicked it out after Pearl Harbor.

So i am formulating an idea, that Ayn Rand wasn't really a libertarian, rather, she was the biggest practical Joker since Jesus.

To start with, she wrote her great libertarian hero as a railroad mogul, but digging into the history of the railroad would have told you right away that the national rail networks simply couldn't have been built without the government taking land away from people in order to do it.  Another was a mining mogul, whose fortune was built during an era of slavery and horrible safety records in mining.

Most of the villains in her book are exactly the kind of conniving backstabbing businessmen that will do anything for a buck everyone complains about when they talk about getting new regulations as well.

Towards the start of the book there is a rant about how money flows towards the person with the biggest pile of shit to sell.

One of the heroes also engages in a seriously /good/ scam to ruin the fortunes of any number of investors who don't do the research into his latest project, undermining the financial system.

One of the key themes of the book is the making of wealth rather than money, again attacking the same kind of inflation and collapse of the financial system that occurred in the late 20s, and again this decade, both following an era of major de-regulation.

In one of her earlier books, it states that boards of directors don't actually exist, that there are one or two people with a personality, and a lot of people who are completely useless, belying that she believes *most* executives are useless, and not just some of them.


Or maybe I'm law of 5ing and she really was so dense she never saw it.

Given how often I ask for these, I may as well start a thread for it.  Any of you college spags have access to this paper?

http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/abs/10.1089/109493100316067

edit: have it

So I've been  watching some coverage of the latest SCOTUS pick and something occurs to me.  The few republicans who seem willing to mount a serious attack on Judge Sotomyor (sp?) are doing it on conservative grounds.  But the dems have the supermajority.  So why don't they attack her on free speech etc?

There's a simpler model. It's called Flow.

I know I said video game theory, but I'm specifically looking at this in terms of player versus player combat.  What exactly are you supposed to do to maintain good flow when the degree of a challenge isn't necessarily in your control.  Making a loss less than catastrophic is the only real thing I can think of.

The second thing I'm pondering, is how the hell do you keep the pacing in a limited turns game (akin to legend of the green dragon for those that remember it), where a player can only take so many actions in a day.  Is there a strategy for this, or do you simply need to ttract the right kind of player?

I finally got around to reading and old Journal of Psychohistory I picked up at a yard sale, and I found this gem:

Spiegel (1974) Identifies a pattern of personality traits which he calls the Grade Five Syndrom.  These are people who are very highly hypnotizable.  He estimates their natural occurance in the population at just under 5%.  Others have suggested that the frequency is somewhat higher, between 5 and 10% of the population.

These individuals are described as exhibiting a posture of trust that can border on a pathological level of compliance with the wishes and beliefs of those in their environment.  They frequently demonstrate trance logic (Orne 1959), which is the capacity to act as if one is unaware of even extreme logical incongruities, and an ease in suspending normal levels of judgment.

[who have read it]

We shall make a list!  In no real order, cause thats too much fucking work.  What books do you think should be on it, what books that are on it should be kicked off?  (say if you actually read the book or not).

Rules: 2/3rds of people who have read it must agree it belongs on the list for it to stay.
At least 2 people who have read it must agree it belongs on the list for it to get there in the first place.

Through the Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll
Cannibalism in the Cars - Mark Twain (short story)
1984 - George Orwell
Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Mysterious Stranger - Mark Twain

Dune - Frank Herbert
Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
A Modest Proposal - Johnathan Swift
The Constitution Of the United States
Common Sense - Thomas Paine
The Martian Chronicles - Ray Bradbury
Thief of Time - Terry Pratchett
Goedel, Escher, Bach - Douglass Hofstadter
No Exit - Sarte
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life - Charles Darwin
The Illuminatus! Trilogy, R. A. Wilson
Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson
American Gods, Neil Gaiman
Neuromancer W. Gibson
Fooled by Randomness, N. N. Taleb
To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Breakfast Of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut
Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - Phillip K Dick
Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
Watchmen - Alan Moore
The Prince - Nicolo Machiavelli
1984 -George Orwell
Cyteen by CJ Cherryh
Fooled by Randomness/Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Surely you're joking mr. Feynmann - Richard Feynman
Steal This Book - Abbie Hoffman
Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash
Starship Troopers - Robert A Heinlein
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson
The Art of Memetics - Unruh and Wilson
The Tao Teh Ching
Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the Empire of Signs - Mark Dery
Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
Mort - Terry Pratchett
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead - Tom Stoppard
Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita
Promethea - Alan Moore
Surely you're joking mr. Feynmann - Feynmann
Robert Greene - The 48 Laws of Power
Book of Five Rings - Musashi
Sun Tzu - The Art of War

I am announcing my intention to publish an Intermittens issue based on metaphors, at least one article (depending on how much material I get) on BIP alternate metaphors, and any other tortured phrases people want to write a piece about.

I'm throwing my hat in to the new metaphor ring.

The Kudzu jungle.



The jungle grows constantly and without ever stopping, and is near impossible to kill.  The paths you take on a daily basis are safe from it, but everything else is blocked from you.  As it grows these paths reinforce, every time you choose not to follow the fork in the road the kudzu covers it more and more, until only the path you take every day is an option for you.  But while you cannot get rid of the jungle, you can get rid of pieces of it, forge new paths, kill off a few of the plants.  And in doing so, you become free, if only for a moment.  When you stop cutting, it will grow again, covering over your old paths, and leaving you with your new ones.

I am currently on a tight food budget, on the grounds I have no job, and no prospect of a job.

I do however, have about 10 kilos of jasmine rice.  So what the hell can i mix with it thats not too pricey.

When I say tight, my budget for next week is 20 dollars.

My water has gone missing.  My jug of nice clean, slightly toxic, but above all tasty wellwater vanished.  I'm more pissed about the jug than the water, money is tight right now, and they started selling cheaper plastic caps on the dollar jugs of water, which means I'll need to buy a gallon of milk to replace it (which is still cheaper than empty jugs).

Anyway, it occurred to me, as I gave in and went to the sink, that the fact I can turn a nob, and cut cold drinkable water, and turn a different nob to get hot water.  Compared to how most people lived throughout history, and still live in far too many places, this is beyond amazing.  Forget computers, forget electric lights, forget airplanes, tap water is a damned miracle from the gods.

When civilization dies, and I have either joined Roger's cannibal tribe, or have enlisted with Enrico's Ostrich riding tranny calvary, tap water will be what I miss most.

And if you don't believe me, go without it for a week.

So Obama has screwed over a smaller group of his followers, and broken another campaign promise.  The man still has two weeks till he takes office and he's already on a roll.  His latest trick?  He's reversed his stance on copyright, and appinted to the 2nd and 3rd positions in the Department of Justice the principle lobbyist behind the last copyright extension act, and the guy who arranged royalty fees so high that when they take effect internet radio will be permanently shut down.  

I know you don't fucking care about the copyright wars, but aside from a quick mention that Biden was already a Hollywood shill and we should have seen this coming, this isn't about that.  This is about the fucking morons who defend Obama despite him breaking campaign promises at record speed.  "His decisions cant all be grand slams."

Seriously, some fucker said that.  Grand slams.  As if Obama has ever acted like a decent person *once*.  Since he got elected he's appointed every lobbyist and party hanger on within reach to high office, and arranged a stimulus package that is being planned by a committee so heavily loaded with Californian politicians that we'll be lucky to see a fucking dime spent in the rest of the country.

The other fuckers are defending him by claiming that the most recent appointees are ok.  Because they were just doing their jobs when they fucked people over.  Much like the logging industry lobbyists bush appointed to the EPA were just doing their jobs.  The man betrayed you.  You need to turn on him like a pack of hungry rats.  That's how it goddamned works.  People elect a politician.  Politician fucks the people, has a great time.  People consume politician in an orgy of blood and shit flinging.  New politicians run for office.

On the plus side Obama looks like he just might break the spirit of the people for good.  My hope of riots this year is strong.

Anyway, the unemployment office is too incompetent to let me tell them I don't want to set up direct deposit over the phone, so I have to go buy stamps.

I'm working my way through the second pot of coffee and I'm starting to see shit.  A message appears in chat then vanishes when I try to read it, and there's a trail flowing my fingertips as I write this.  I need to be up for another 6 and a half hours.

It never used to be this hard to go without sleep.  Next time I need to fix my schedule I'm using sleeping pills.  For now I chug down half a pot of overpriced hippie coffee my brother got me for Christmas.  The stuffs organic-fair trade.

The fair trade part doesn't bug me so much, if some poor assed third world farmer wants to earn three times what he did the year before I'm happy to give him an extra quarter on a 5 dollar bag of coffee, (I wish to god I was making that up; 2%, thats what the farmer sees of what you pay in the grocery store, US farmers don't get a better deal, just free government money).

What I do object to is doubling the price so the hippies can have it organic.  Fuckers are cutting down the rain-forest to get the extra land for all that organic food too, hippies should know better. 

Unfortunately instead of peace love and tree humping today's hippies have token anti bush bumper stickers from 6 years ago, a 'no on proposition 8' pin even though they didn't vote, and organic food.  They can't even get pacifism wrong correctly, we haven't had a decent riot in this country since I was barely big enough to burn my hand on the stove.

Decent coffee though.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/3lbhlm

Actually prose with illustrations.  Little bit purple, but interesting nonetheless.

Its somewhere between midnight and one in the morning.  I'm composing this in my head because I'm actually away from my computer for once.  It's snowing, a few inches on the ground already.  There are no cars or plows to push it off the road yet though, and the clean snowfall glows a soft orange, the street lights diffused across the whole street instead of pools of light.  I look up and that same orange glow lights up the sky, and though there is no moon or stars, the whole city is lit by is own light reflected back down by the snowfall.  I only see this a few times each year, this one isn't the best, the snow is too heavy to really light up the sky.  I trudge the rest of the way to the store on foot, wishing I'd brought a jacket.  Or pants.  The stores parking lot glows bright white, and others shuffle in an out, in heavy winter gear, desperate to get their last drink of watered down beer before sales are cutoff for the night.  When I come back out of the store, the snow has stopped, the sky has gone dark again, with just enough light coming from the city to make out the outlines of the clouds.  The streets still glow though, and will until a plow comes by to clear the roads for morning traffic.

http://www.thepublicdomain.org/download/

Quoting a giant chunk of it, just because its CC-BY-NC and I can.

Each person has a different breaking point. For one of my students it was United States Patent number 6,004,596 for a "Sealed Crustless Sandwich." In the curiously mangled form of English that patent law produces, it was described this way:
2

    A sealed crustless sandwich for providing a convenient sandwich without an outer crust which can be stored for long periods of time without a central filling from leaking outwardly. The sandwich includes a lower bread portion, an upper bread portion, an upper filling and a lower filling between the lower and upper bread portions, a center filling sealed between the upper and lower fillings, and a crimped edge along an outer perimeter of the bread portions for sealing the fillings there between. The upper and lower fillings are preferably comprised of peanut butter and the center filling is comprised of at least jelly. The center filling is prevented from radiating outwardly into and through the bread portions from the surrounding peanut butter.1

3

"But why does this upset you?" I asked; "you've seen much worse than this." And he had. There are patents on human genes, on auctions, on algorithms.2 The U.S. Olympic Committee has an expansive right akin to a trademark over the word "Olympic" and will not permit gay activists to hold a "Gay Olympic Games." The Supreme Court sees no First Amendment problem with this.3 Margaret Mitchell's estate famously tried to use copyright to prevent Gone With the Wind from being told from a slave's point of view.4 The copyright over the words you are now reading will not expire until seventy years after my death; the men die young in my family, but still you will allow me to hope that this might put it close to the year 2100. Congress periodically considers legislative proposals that would allow the ownership of facts.5 The Digital Millennium Copyright Act gives content providers a whole array of legally protected digital fences to enclose their work.6 In some cases it effectively removes the privilege of fair use. Each day brings some new Internet horror story about the excesses of intellectual property. Some of them are even true. The list goes on and on. (By the end of this book, I hope to have convinced you that this matters.) With all of this going on, this enclosure movement of the mind, this locking up of symbols and themes and facts and genes and ideas (and eventually people), why get excited about the patenting of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich? "I just thought that there were limits," he said; "some things should be sacred."
4

This book is an attempt to tell the story of the battles over intellectual property, the range wars of the information age. I want to convince you that intellectual property is important, that it is something that any informed citizen needs to know a little about, in the same way that any informed citizen needs to know at least something about the environment, or civil rights, or the way the economy works. I will try my best to be fair, to explain the issues and give both sides of the argument. Still, you should know that this is more than mere description. In the pages that follow, I try to show that current intellectual property policy is overwhelmingly and tragically bad in ways that everyone, and not just lawyers or economists, should care about. We are making bad decisions that will have a negative effect on our culture, our kids' schools, and our communications networks; on free speech, medicine, and scientific research. We are wasting some of the promise of the Internet, running the risk of ruining an amazing system of scientific innovation, carving out an intellectual property exemption to the First Amendment. I do not write this as an enemy of intellectual property, a dot-communist ready to end all property rights; in fact, I am a fan. It is precisely because I am a fan that I am so alarmed about the direction we are taking.
5

Still, the message of this book is neither doom nor gloom. None of these decisions is irrevocable. The worst ones can still be avoided altogether, and there are powerful counterweights in both law and culture to the negative trends I describe here. There are lots of reasons for optimism. I will get to most of these later, but one bears mentioning now. Contrary to what everyone has told you, the subject of intellectual property is both accessible and interesting; what people can understand, they can change—or pressure their legislators to change.
6

I stress this point because I want to challenge a kind of willed ignorance. Every news story refers to intellectual property as "arcane," "technical," or "abstruse" in the same way as they referred to former attorney general Alberto Gonzales as "controversial." It is a verbal tic and it serves to reinforce the idea that this is something about which popular debate is impossible. But it is also wrong. The central issues of intellectual property are not technical, abstruse, or arcane. To be sure, the rules of intellectual property law can be as complex as a tax code (though they should not be). But at the heart of intellectual property law are a set of ideas that a ten-year-old can understand perfectly well. (While writing this book, I checked this on a ten-year-old I then happened to have around the house.) You do not need to be a scientist or an economist or a lawyer to understand it. The stuff is also a lot of fun to think about. I live in constant wonder that they pay me to do so.
7

Should you be able to tell the story of Gone With the Wind from a slave's point of view even if the author does not want you to? Should the Dallas Cowboys be able to stop the release of Debbie Does Dallas, a cheesy porno flick, in which the title character brings great dishonor to a uniform similar to that worn by the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders? (After all, the audience might end up associating the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders with . . . well, commodified sexuality.) 7
8

Should the U.S. Commerce Department be able to patent the genes of a Guyami Indian woman who shows an unusual resistance to leukemia?8 What would it mean to patent someone's genes, anyway? Forbidding scientific research on the gene without the patent holder's consent? Forbidding human reproduction? Can religions secure copyrights over their scriptures? Even the ones they claim to have been dictated by gods or aliens? Even if American copyright law requires "an author," presumably a human one?9 Can they use those copyrights to discipline heretics or critics who insist on quoting the scripture in full?
9

Should anyone own the protocols—the agreed-upon common technical standards—that make the Internet possible? Does reading a Web page count as "copying" it?10 Should that question depend on technical "facts" (for example, how long the page stays in your browser's cache) or should it depend on some choice that we want to make about the extent of the copyright holder's rights?
10

These questions may be hard, because the underlying moral and political and economic issues need to be thought through. They may be weird; alien scriptural dictation might qualify there. They surely aren't uninteresting, although I admit to a certain prejudice on that point. And some of them, like the design of our telecommunications networks, or the patenting of human genes, or the relationship between copyright and free speech, are not merely interesting, they are important. It seems like a bad idea to leave them to a few lawyers and lobbyists simply because you are told they are "technical."
11

So the first goal of the book is to introduce you to intellectual property, to explain why it matters, why it is the legal form of the information age. The second goal is to persuade you that our intellectual property policy is going the wrong way; two roads are diverging and we are on the one that doesn't lead to Rome.
12

The third goal is harder to explain. We have a simple word for, and an intuitive understanding of, the complex reality of "property." Admittedly, lawyers think about property differently from the way lay-people do; this is only one of the strange mental changes that law school brings. But everyone in our society has a richly textured understanding of "mine" and "thine," of rights of exclusion, of division of rights over the same property (for example, between tenant and landlord), of transfer of rights in part or in whole (for example, rental or sale). But what about the opposite of property—property's antonym, property's outside? What is it? Is it just stuff that is not worth owning—abandoned junk? Stuff that is not yet owned—such as a seashell on a public beach, about to be taken home? Or stuff that cannot be owned—a human being, for example? Or stuff that is collectively owned—would that be the radio spectrum or a public park? Or stuff that is owned by no one, such as the deep seabed or the moon? Property's outside, whether it is "the public domain" or "the commons," turns out to be harder to grasp than its inside. To the extent that we think about property's outside, it tends to have a negative connotation; we want to get stuff out of the lost-and-found office and back into circulation as property. We talk of "the tragedy of the commons,"11 meaning that unowned or collectively owned resources will be managed poorly; the common pasture will be overgrazed by the villagers' sheep because no one has an incentive to hold back.
13

When the subject is intellectual property, this gap in our knowledge turns out to be important because our intellectual property system depends on a balance between what is property and what is not. For a set of reasons that I will explain later, "the opposite of property" is a concept that is much more important when we come to the world of ideas, information, expression, and invention. We want a lot of material to be in the public domain, material that can be spread without property rights. "The general rule of law is, that the noblest of human productions—knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas—become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use."12 Our art, our culture, our science depend on this public domain every bit as much as they depend on intellectual property. The third goal of this book is to explore property's outside, property's various antonyms, and to show how we are undervaluing the public domain and the information commons at the very moment in history when we need them most. Academic articles and clever legal briefs cannot solve this problem alone.
14

Instead, I argue that precisely because we are in the information age, we need a movement—akin to the environmental movement—to preserve the public domain. The explosion of industrial technologies that threatened the environment also taught us to recognize its value. The explosion of information technologies has precipitated an intellectual land grab; it must also teach us about both the existence and the value of the public domain. This enlightenment does not happen by itself. The environmentalists helped us to see the world differently, to see that there was such a thing as "the environment" rather than just my pond, your forest, his canal. We need to do the same thing in the information environment.
15

We have to "invent" the public domain before we can save it.
16

A word about style. I am trying to write about complicated issues, some of which have been neglected by academic scholarship, while others have been catalogued in detail. I want to advance the field, to piece together the story of the second enclosure movement, to tell you something new about the balance between property and its opposite. But I want to do so in a way that is readable. For those in my profession, being readable is a dangerous goal. You have never heard true condescension until you have heard academics pronounce the word "popularizer." They say it as Isadora Duncan might have said "dowdy." To be honest, I share their concern. All too often, clarity is achieved by leaving out the key qualification necessary to the argument, the subtlety of meaning, the inconvenient empirical evidence.
17

My solution is not a terribly satisfactory one. A lot of material has been exiled to endnotes. The endnotes for each chapter also include a short guide to further reading. I have used citations sparingly, but more widely than an author of a popular book normally does, so that the scholarly audience can trace out my reasoning. But the core of the argument is in the text.
18

The second balance I have struggled to hit is that between breadth and depth. The central thesis of the book is that the line between intellectual property and the public domain is important in every area of culture, science, and technology. As a result, it ranges widely in subject matter. Yet readers come with different backgrounds, interests, and bodies of knowledge. As a result, the structure of the book is designed to facilitate self-selection based on interest. The first three chapters and the conclusion provide the theoretical basis. Each chapter builds on those themes, but is also designed to be largely freestanding. The readers who thrill to the idea that there might be constitutional challenges to the regulation of digital speech by copyright law may wallow in those arguments to their hearts' content. Others may quickly grasp the gist and head on for the story of how Ray Charles's voice ended up in a mashup attacking President Bush, or the discussion of genetically engineered bacteria that take photographs and are themselves the subject of intellectual property rights. To those readers who nevertheless conclude that I have failed to balance correctly between precision and clarity, or breadth and depth, I offer my apologies. I fear you may be right. It was not for want of trying.

TLDR - Its a book about copyright, from a slightly freetarded bias.

This is a sample for something I may be writing semi-regularly.

It is time to discuss the tale of the SEC, and mamma.com.  Just in case you aren't aware, the SEC goes after certain classes of financial crimes, and with the US economy collapsing due to widespred malfeasance, they take on a certain spotlight.  So given the choice of what to go after, the hidden losses, the predatory contracts, the credit companies that swore real estate was going to make more money than the gross planetary income, or insider traders at mamma.com, they of course went after mamma.com.

While I can't imagine you've never heard of them, a bit of background. Mamma.com shows search results from other sites, specifically ask.com and about.com.  Which you may not have heard of, but never fear, mamma.com will teach you of them.

Back tou our tale, with no indication that during a collapsing economy a search site nobody has heard of, and which fails to display its ads every time, was about to go belly up, one man recieved a tip off that it was about to go belly up, and sold his stock in mamma.com.  The SEC caught him though, and has discovered he in fact was tipped off to the impending doom of mamma.com.  So tonight, rest assured, despite the impending collapse of half the globes economy, and a deficit that outweighs the projected income, the federal government still protects us.  From mamma.com.

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=6580

The new version of the bailout bill is over 300 pages long, most of it riders, and is expected to cost up to 1.8 trillion (but it might be as small as 1.5 trillion too!) in give aways and tax cuts.  It's also apparently the compromise bill the democrats asked for.  It's already passed in the Senate, and awaiting a House vote.  I spent some time thinking about who might actually stand up and oppose it, and the only person that came to mind is Ron Paul.

Things are now so desperate that I am forced to have hope in RON FUCKING PAUL.  We're going to be so fucked my ass is already bleeding.

Wikipedia editors need to pull their heads out of their collective ass, and stop arguing about how to word a sentence.

</rant>

I got fooled by Obama. So help me he seemed right. Obama ran on promises of transparency, and holding accountable those that participated in the raping of our liberties since pretty much before I was born. He had all the right positions on technology and the Patent system. Despite myself, I started to have hope in the system. That things really can change.

Hope tends to addle peoples brains like that.

Since then, I've watched as he gave up his position on campaign finance reform, so that he can rake in the benefit of massive donations, watched as he decided that changing the law to allow widespread wiretapping was more important then ensuring those complicit in the last 20 years of eavesdropping are held accountable.

So I'm back here, to rant into empty cyberspace once more, and to watch and to wait. And when the messiah turns out to be another compromised politician, who will give your money to the rich, and strip away what little rights haven't been taken already; I will laugh.

War is a seriously fucked up thing.  I'm not talking about the killing and destruction and all that though.  I'm talking about the part where leaders actually convince thousands, sometimes millions of people to go off and die.  And yes, it's one thing to be attacked, but there is something deeply broken in the human mind that allows it to actually go out and join the army, or even to be conscripted, for no reason other than because someone put up a propaganda poster.

What, exactly, makes us so different than every other modern counter culture that thinks it figured something out the rest of the masses didn't?

http://members.shaw.ca/jeanaltemeyer/drbob/TheAuthoritarians.pdf

Found this while cleaning my hard drive, linking it here.

I found myself going to the papers that came with my laptop last night, looking for instructions on opening the damnable thing.  The entire instructions for dealing with it (adding memory) say to 'let the experts handle it'.  And that if you try to do it yourself, you might damage it.

Okay, yada yada warranty yada yada shitty design most users shouldn't touch.  But this culture of dependency is starting to drive me nuts.  I deal with this every day, with people who are willing to pay a couple hundred dollars to avoid having to learn how to back up their data themselves, or who freak when they find out we expect them to actually do work instead of just sending said 200 dollar technician out to them to fix it when it goes tits up.  And the people that are shocked when I tell them their allowed to fix it themselves when it breaks.

I hear it in people who are absolutely terrified of the idea of looking up some case law and defending themselves in court, of people who constantly refer to 'expert opinions' because they can't be bothered to learn about it, and who refuse to learn the first thing about how to maintain their car without going to jiffy lube.  I even know people who are afraid to paint their own walls.

Well fuck you all, I'm going to open that damned computer case.  And even if I don't change my own oil, that doesn't mean I haven't done it, or that I can't if Jiffy Lube decides to raise its prices.

I'd finish this up with a 'go fuck yourself' but you probably need somebody to do that for you too.

ERIS(strife), eldest duaghter of Erebos and Nyx, was known to the greeks to have borne many children, among them Toil, and Forgetfulness, the Pains, Fighting and Battles, the Murders and the Man-slaughters, the Quarrels, the Lies, the Disputes, and Lawlessness and Ruin, and finally Oath who doesn't much care for his other siblings.

She also had other children, that the greeks never mentioned, because they were spiteful men.  She bore Gelus(Laughter) and Algea(Sorrow), the gods of the stage.  Elpis(Hope) was among her children let loose on the world by Pandora, and with Dionysius she bore Komos(Revel).  She was also the mother of the twins Lawyers and Politicians*.  Finally her youngest child is Jonni, the god of apples, though he was born long after the greeks.

*The greeks didn't mention this because some things or too horrible to blame on anyone, rather than out of spite.  It is however, a big part of why they hated Eris so much.


(This isn't really finished, so suggestions for other children are welcome, and I could use the ancient greek words for lawyers and politicians if anybody has any idea.)

I've been thinking (I know I'm not supposed to, I do it anyway) a bit about the different kinds of enlightenment that I've seen in different philosophies and religions.

Being able to think for yourself

The Joke

The meaningless existence

Detatchement from the machine.

Admittence of a distorted reality view.  (BIP)

A couple of these are new to me within the last month, others seem to be incorporated into dozens of religions and philosophies, and I'm starting to wonder, what else am I missing?

I've been reading too much again, and it has me thinking about the long twisted paths in our lives.  So I wanted to talk about mine.  See the whole reason I ended up here is chess.

Yeah, doesn't make much sense does it, here goes.  When I was however old (was long enough ago that I forget think I was 10 or so).  My dad taught me how to play chess.  I sucked.  So I got him to buy chess lessons for me (on the thoery that I would be able to beat him, I still can't though, sneaky bastard bought books on chess and read them while I was in classes).  While I was there early one day, the chess instructor taught me how to play Magic: the gathering, all well and good for her, cause she owned a shop that sold wem, so I would stop by every now and then and buy some, this kept going till junior high, when one of my magic buddies talked me into playing D&D (insert ominous Jack Chick inspired music here). 

Never did get into witch craft, but farther down the road, a D&D buddy talked me into going to his anime club.  Then an anime buddy introduced my to webcomics.  Then on a webcomic forum I got pulled into IRC, then an IRC buddy talked me into linux.  Then a linux distro came with a RSS feed for slashdot, finally, someone on slashdot linked PD.com, and here I am.

Not sure what my point was, except maybe wondering if I hit some sort of astronomical odds to get here, or if I would have found some other path.

And I'm now even more confused than before.


Good job.   

This is mostly a laundry list of things I've identified as set ups that keep people hooked up to the machine.  They may or may not be anything original in it, mostly trying to collect my thoughts and get people to point out anything I've missed.

The money game, the idea that more money (above and beyond what you actually need)=better.  One of the stronger traps, as most people only manage to get it by being 100% in tune with the machine.  Corporate drones and artistic sellouts.

Conformist rebellion.  Corporate driven subculture, relatively weak trap, keeps people feeding money into the machine, and marks potential troublemakers as outcasts, preventing them from doing any real damage.

Groupthink counterculture.  Political and ideological movements, usually very conformist in goals, in the past you'd see a lot of communists and hippies (according to history books anyway, wasn't around then), these days you seem get libertarians.

Politics, in general.  I think it was the BIP, might have been a forum post here, talked about politics forcing you to choose between freedoms.  Somewhere I have a chart done up of mindsets in a large political forum, showed a very hard line trend towards this kind of thinking.  The two politicians you get to choose from tend to be minimally different outside of key issues as well.

The popularity contest.  All the good cogs in the machine are expected to act in a certain way so everybody will like them.  Caring what other people think, simply for the sake of being liked, seems a fast track to giving up your will to the machine.

entertainment, in general.  TV, alcohol, sex, music, video games, drugs, anything to distract the masses from looking at their plight.  And keep them spending of course.  Trickier one to get ahold than the others, not dangerous in moderation, and not clean cut either, some entertainment can serve to try and wake people up from a cabbage state.  Need not actually be created by the machine.

Religion, in general.  established religion is pretty obvious.  fringe religion is a poor means of control, but seems to at least serve as a distraction.

anybody have anything I missed?

I completely and utterly forgot what I was going to post here....

Ah, right.

---

A cat sat scratching at the door, asking to be let out.

"But it is cold outside" said the human.

To which the cat began to meow loudly.

"But you could get hurt."  Said the human.

To which the cat threatened to hork a fhairball on the human's shoes.

"Fine" said the human, who opened the door.

To which the cat ignored, and went into the kitchen.

---

Or some such pretentious BS.

I've been thinking a bit about the idea of reprogramming the machine, and thought of something I came across a few years back.

Early in the days of the civil rights movement, there was a concept of frown power.  Whenever anybody said something racist, people were supposed to frown at them pointedly.  Thus exerting a low level social pressure to not be racist, or at least, not admit that you are.

Thoughts?

Edit: I cannot spell, at all.