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My grandfather and a lot of my friends' parents watch Dr. Phil compulsively. Poor masochists...

There's really nothing worth watching on TV anymore, except for a few things on the Sci-Fi channel (old stuff mostly, and vampire movies...) All the shows that were ever worth watching on any other network have been cancelled and replaced by drivel.

snap, son. poptarts are no reward for a missed mindfuck



uhkhkkjjk kjk *implodes*

No no no, not missed at all. It worked perfectly, which is why I had to put up with him griping at me, which was quite a lot more work than the mindfuck itself.

If I annihilate him, I'll have no one to give ulcers to by worrying them shitless.

At any rate, I seem to like him for some reason or other, he's just infuriatingly dense - he knows what's wrong with the world, and his idea of a solution is to knuckle under and wait for it to end.

Anyway, for some reason or other I found extra Pop-Tarts, and it was good, and I felt compelled to tell of its goodness because I was spaced out from spending too much time reading the Illuminatus! trilogy.

The Goddess likes it when you put up with Greyfaces.

My most order-oriented friend discourages me from mindfucks that could "get me in trouble." After one which, he assured me, would get me expelled if I were caught, the Goddess rewarded me for putting up with his derision in good humor - on reaching to shove a box of Pop-Tarts that I had emptied the day before under my bed, I knocked out a fifth packet of the things.

11/pi!

Please to note Religionists.

So... either A) all mystical experiences are the result of slightly abnormal brain activity which can be induced by magnetic fields (and drugs, though the article isn't about that) B) we can sense other beings through the presence of their magnetic fields, and can duplicate the experience with these special hats, or C) the whole article is bogus, misinformation, or somehow twisted to promote a view of Reality(tm) that contains only easily explainable things (much like religion, although religious presentations of information tend to involve less experimentation and more sophistry).

I take it you were implying A? The experiment didn't eliminate the possibility of B, and options like C are always worth noting.

Back to the main rant... why not madgijkeque? Seriously. You can't prove it doesn't exist any more than anyone can prove it does.

As for the religion vs. spirituality thing, I think that at the present, the majority of people feel like they need to be told what to do - we have spent thousands of years living under systems that tell us what to think, how to behave, and what's Real(tm). They simply aren't prepared to Make Up Their Own Shit. It would drive them mad. In fact, just go propose the idea to someone: most people think you're kidding, or that you are certifiably insane. THEY need their hard-and-fast realities, their universal truths, their structured communities and religious worship. It's their spiritual life-support that keeps their pathetic excuses for lives afloat because they can't handle their own spirituality.

This, of course, applies to Scientism (the belief that the entire universe is knowable and can be explained through scientific research; not to be confused with Scientology) as much as it does any other belief system.

In the end, we're all just bullshitting anyway because none of us can prove anything but what we've experienced, and even that we can only prove to ourselves (maybe). It's just that some people listen to other people's bullshit and accept it as their own, which creates religious structures that make manipulation of others simple, while others of us like to make up our own bullshit, which means that manipulation of us is one level more subtle.

Everything I've said was either made up or stolen from someone who made it up, I'm not sure which. Validity not guaranteed, your mileage may vary.

*blinks*

I can't figure out if I agree with you or not.

However, I'm sure that if I do I love your rant, and if I don't then you're an asshole.

Yes, but he's an enjoyable hack.

This would be even funnier if the French guys weren't faking and the hoax confession was a coverup.

The whole thing about dragons and mouths made me think of the Chinese proverb, "Opportunity is a dragon with a gift in its mouth." And then I remembered that I'd forgotten the rest of it... and come to think of it, I just remembered I'm playing the Game, so I lose.

At any rate... it was good until the dragons came in.

The Iron Maiden,
The rack, the thumbscrews, the lash,
Make my day brighter.

Next: On chocolate mousse.

I'd like to say I think you're exaggerating, but I don't.

You're right; eventually they will succeed and the old regime, which was at least non-hostile, will be replaced. If we're lucky, that's all they really want and they'll stop there. If we're not, they'll do what you said and ally themselves with Iran and Iraq in preparation for WWIII. Peaceful negotiations, I predict, won't go well. If China joins them, we're just screwed. (And I don't see them passing up an opportunity to finish us off and become the most powerful nation on Earth.) Of course, it really doesn't matter who wins, because whoever starts losing will probably be so freaking scared of being forced to live under a social system imposed by their enemies that they'll probably start dropping nukes, and the world will be reduced to a barren wasteland.

And the worst part is that the war doesn't have to happen, because neither side is any more "right" than the other. Western nations are either imperialists or ex-imperialists, but Arab nations don't have a great record of playing nice either. We just can't get our heads around the idea that it's okay for there to be people who don't live like us.

And as luck would have it, I'm just the right age to get drafted unless the war is shorter than I think it will be: I'll be eighteen in less than a year and a half. I think I need to find a cave to hide in.

Impressive. I don't think I could keep that up. 00;;

Reading it was like trying to look around corners without actually stepping past them.

Good rant... is the spark the spark that knows I should sleep in and forget about class and is extinguished when I get up anyway, or the one that considers getting up early and actually being prepared for class, which is extinguished when I realize that if I got up any earlier my nightly sleep total would be negative?

And yet people are still dying all over the world from perfectly curable diseases, not to mention global war that makes you long for the good old days of MAD!

Just means we need to be doing more than we are currently doing.

We need to grab bigger chisels.

People are dying because we are not putting enough pressure on our governments to mandate pharmaceutical companies to provide them with meds. We're also letting our politicians walk away from the responsibility Europe and the US has over the state of the place where most of those people are dying-Africa. Our ancestors fucked it up. Unfortunately they left it for us to fix. We're dooing a piss-poor job of that so far.

I'm sorry, the idea of the government mandating that a company give away free product doesn't sit well with me. What if we bought the meds and sent them over? Then everyone's happy.