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But what about the poor lentils?
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This is EXACTLY what I was picturing when Lentils were mentioned - love the Young Ones!

Currently reading The Crying of Lot 49 by Pynchon. So far it's a damn good time (I'm only about 30 or 40 pages into it and it's just starting to get rolling), and I just picked up almost all of his books other than the newest one, so I'll be working my way through them in the next couple weeks.

As much as I liked Gravity's Rainbow (which I really liked), this one is much more accessible. GR needed a pretty sizable effort to stay on top of the characters and underlying motivations (which made it so good), and it's really interesting to get that same writing style in a story that's much more straightforward than GR in Lot 49 while still keeping that sense of the absurd-as-normal that wound through the narrative in GR. WASTE, indeed!

Sad but true. No issue is too important to completely reverse your position on as long as it opposes the Democrats, after all!

In a semi-related note, http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/08/18/frank.heath.care/index.html

Rep. Barney Frank (D, MA) made news by calling the protesters to task. Rather than following the usual "ignore it and hope it goes away" strategy that Dems seem to have been following in the Town Hall meetings during the Recess, Frank bit right back at them.

"When you ask me that question, I'm going to revert to my ethnic heritage and ask you a question: On what planet do you spend most of your time?" Frank asked.

"You stand there with a picture of the president defaced to look like Hitler and compare the effort to increase health care to the Nazis," he said, adding such behavior demonstrated the strength of First Amendment guarantees of what he called "contemptible" free speech.

"Trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table," Frank said to the woman. "I have no interest in doing it."

This was fun: I just heard a Republican pundit say that we don't need a Public Option... all we need is "more regulation of the health care industry."   

A Republican ... arguing FOR increased governmental regulation ...

I ... I just, well ... that's ...

Bump this in a month or so so I might actually remember it and I should be good to go

Perhaps.  But still, in some small way, this feels like I'm saying "I validate the shitty stuff this country believes in, because I want to be part of it."

I don't, of course, but I can see that line of logic being pursued.  At least with being Australian, I can always just say I never asked to be born there.  Actively pursuing citizenship is something else.

You owe the humans nothing.  Use their system for what it's worth, and don't worry about "validating" them.  They do that for themselves, anyway, and they'd kill you on the spot if they ever figured out what you stand for.  Be the remora.

This. The more documents you have to wave in their faces, the easier it is for you to use those documents to blind them to what it is you're REALLY doing. Hell, it even gives them the appearance that you're trying to be one of them, which will (hopefully) further blind them to those acts that fly in the face of that. Think of it as protective coloration, rather than formalizing an allegiance to an ideal or system.

Indeed, Kai. That's what always struck me as hilarious about the NWO thing - Bush, Sr. coined the phrase in I believe one of the State of the Union speeches (and started the ball rolling for globalism as ordered by corporate America looking to "outsource" jobs and production via tax breaks). IIRC, I don't think it caught on as a bogeyman until the Clinton era, though. Could be wrong about that, but I seem to remember it was blamed on Clinton since it started having noticeable effects in the mid 90s, even though it was started by Bush, Sr. (sound familiar? )

http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/zontv/2009/08/lou_dobbs_cnn_birthers_obama_m.html An article about CNN's journalistic integrity (don't laugh!) and Dobbs' "birther" support. The true gold is in the comments, though.

Black helicopters.
Mena.
New World Order.
Hillary Clinton is a lesbian Satanist.
UN troops secretly preparing to take over the USA.
The Patriot Movement.

If TOTSE was still up, I'd link you to the batshit insanity that was the early 90s...every bit as good as this, for sure.  The only difference is now the Movement has slipped the leash, and the crazy has now moved up into the main ranks of the GOP.  Before, there were enough old skool republicans to (barely) keep the movement under control - though Newt and his merry gang didn't help matters.

i never understood the crazy aspect of black helicopters.  Isn't that just about helicopters that have noise reduction tech?

Oh no - that would have some rational basis! The Black Helicopters were the front line of the UN/NWO army that was being poised to force the whole world into a one-world totalitarian government (run by the socialist fascists of the Clinton regime? can't remember who was supposed to be running the UN/NWO regime). The Black Helicopters are how "they" would come to get you, according to the crazies, at least as far as I remember from the lunatic rantings of the early/mid '90s.

Shall we start a new thread for the book, once we want to discuss it?  Because I think that is a good plan.

Seconded. Sounds like a plan - probably best to do a new thread for each book that gets this treatment, too. We can use this thread to coordinate the next book choice as well, in order to assist in keeping each thread's discussion (at least a little) on point for the book of the (two) week(s).

I'm not understanding the need for the 66% part of things. Is it just an artificial constriction, or is there something significant statistically or mathematically regarding the 2/3 thing? All it really seems to be doing is artificially inflating the number of probable hits, which was confirmed in the 45 "both" results.

There are a ton of already-in-existence tests and methods for determining accuracy of predictions, like the Zener Cards (here is an online card test for those interested in seeing the style). Why are we reinventing the wheel, and only using statistically meaningless sample sizes? Only 100 rolls/cards/whatever is FAR too small a sample size to determine any meaning beyond "random luck", especially with the results being weighed towards so many potential hits via the 1-4/3-6 methodology.

It's a neat parlor trick, I guess, but I'm having trouble figuring out what this might actually show, other than that random chance is, in fact, random.

I'm in the middle of Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. Fascinating book, so many threads, subtexts, paranoias, characters, etc. that it can be ... interesting to keep track of everything on the first read-through. Good stuff, though.

How do people live in such abject fear of imaginary enemies? 

Conditioning, via two fronts. First, their world-view is reinforced as being divinely ordained (and is the only "authorized" way to avoid the fear) through religious and social structures (isolation from other opinions being the prime factor in bulwarking this reinforcement), and second being conditioned that anything that doesn't comply with or support that reinforced world-view is de facto directly threatening that world-view (via internet/radio/social contacts using fear as the primary rallying point).

It doesn't matter if the individuals are actually threatened or not - they've been conditioned to fear that which they are told to fear, and look for solutions to that fear solely from those avenues that tell them what to fear, and to ignore (even in the face of blatant hypocrisies) any position, opinion or evidence that disagrees with what they are told they should fear.  It's a feedback loop and concentrates a LOT of power into the leaders from their constituents.

This shift to using peoples' fear as a tool of political control came to the fore in the 60s with the race riots. The GOP switched from a fiscally conservative force to a socially conservative force (see Nixon and Reagan) and showed just how effective the use of social issues was to rally the base around non-social agendas, and in the subsequent years the techniques to reinforce this system have only been improved (see Karl Rove, Limbaugh and Cheney). The Dems vacilate between following the GOP's lead (which never works as they don't have the solid core of religious right to reliably follow the party line homogenously - the Dem base is too ideologically varied to lock-step in sufficient numbers like the GOP can motivate the hard-right) and ignoring it (which only tends to work in times of economic stress when social issues take a back seat to economic ones in the national climate).

Cram's mention of the two-party system as escalating factor is definitely true - the worst situation historically for either GOP or Dems has been viable 3rd-party candidates such as Wallace  or Perot, as it undermines the ability of either side's ideologues to dominate the public debate by introducing options outside the control of the feedback loops put in place to reinforce the "us vs. them" atmosphere most conducive to control by either the GOP or Dems.

Britain is a two-party system though, and its not this bad here.  Nowhere near.

True to an extent - while the UK has two dominant parties, the other parties are at least seen as potentially viable - as horrible as, say, the BNP is, they're treated as a legitemate faction in the UK - in the US they'd be (and already really are) subsumed in the GOP and not be allowed to exist outside of the GOP infrastructure and control systems. The two-party system has been taken to an extreme in the US compared to any other country I can think of, mostly for the purposes of maintaining power in the hands of the two parties.

For example, look at the Green party in the US in 2000. Nader was used as a scapegoat by BOTH parties as to why Gore lost Florida, conveniently avoiding all of the ballot mess and other legal and social factors that gave the state (and the election) to Bush. Even the remote specter of a 3rd party altering the outcome away from either the GOP or Dems was enough to make both parties offer the Green party as a political scapegoat to the underlying causes, since the potential of a strong 3rd party causes too many problems for both the GOP and the Dems.

Awesome, Cain! Lots and lots to chew through here and I look forward to more

link doesn't work.

It isn't working for me either, but the full text is at the following link (not a PDF, just a whole lot of text):

http://www.rawilsonfans.com/downloads/sct.htm