Loyalty without truth
is a trail to tyranny.
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a middle-aged George Washington
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Wednesday, 27 September 2006 at 1h 6m 30s | Top down management | The television media is all top down. That is the entire televised experience
is controlled or overseen by a small group of managers and producers. The
opposite of top down management is bottom up management; that is, all
information comes from a multiplicity of sources, and decisions by the group
are based upon the free awareness of these multiple sources. A top down
management system would inherently filter the sources and would also "dress up"
the presentation because the information which becomes televised always pass
through the oversight by the small group of managers and producers.
So when newspapers and television stations become owned by the same company,
whose interest is served? Currently media companies can control 40 percent of
any local market. Why should they control that much? How come there isn't a
law that mandates every media company must be independent and not conglomerated
into hundreds and thousands under the management system of a larger
corporation? The television station in San Francisco should not be under the
same management system of the one in Oakland, or Los Angeles or Sacramento ---
or New York or Seattle or Boston or .... Media companies do not have to
conglomerate to become profitable, they only do so because the profits can
become astronomical at the same time that the content can be micro-managed.
This micro-management is however not beneficial for a democracy, which only
flourishes under a bottom-up type of management system. In my opinion, the
Sherman Anti-Trust Act should be enacted upon all these media conglomerates.
They should all be broken apart and sold, just like what was done to Standard
Oil in the early 1900's and AT&T in the latter 1970's and early 80's.
This is actually a conservative -- not a liberal or radical -- position. The
point is to conserve our democracy, and the only way to do so is to break apart
the anti-democratic forces in our society. Don't let the talking heads hi-jack
the true meaning of the word conservative. Conserve means to preserve, or to
believe that changes to the original principle are not always beneficial to the
principle at all.
And in this case, in order to preserve our democracy, we must ensure that
everyone has a way to express their viewpoint, and that all news is presented
equally. With the top down management system, this is an inherently impossible
result. So we are forced to conclude that in order to preserve our democracy,
we must therefore take the action of breaking up and selling the media
conglomerates.
| Tuesday, 26 September 2006 at 0h 12m 5s | Napsters is the 2006 Yahoo baseball champion |
| Monday, 25 September 2006 at 21h 26m 17s | The Gold and Silver myth | Gold, Silver are not inherently valuable. They are valuable because people buy
gold and silver. When paper money was backed by gold and silver, the paper was
not any less or more valuable, nor any less or more secure. The only difference
was that there was a 2nd layer to the exchange rates between currency.
Currency is valuable when the world economy uses currency in the market
exchange. Your money is not valuable in the world economy because your nation
doesn't produce or sell valuable commodities. Making the currency backed by
Gold and Silver does not make a currency more or less valuable in and of itself.
For instance, the US Dollar is the currency used on the Petroleum oil exchange,
and so any nation that wants oil has to buy dollars in order to place bids on
the Petroleum market. This demand for dollars creates a need for dollars which
gives dollars value. If the petroleum markets were denominated in Euro's or
Yen, then the demand for dollars would decrease, and the exchange rates would
plummet. This would still occur if dollars were backed by Gold and Silver, and
in fact, would be much worse, because then US Treasury would be further obliged
to buy Gold and Silver in order to sustain the changing exchange rates.
This is why the world went off the gold standard -- it was too damn costly, and
too subject to speculative bubbles, because drops or rises in currency involved
mandatory purchases of gold and silver which are measured in other markets.
| Sunday, 24 September 2006 at 22h 5m 46s | Having a good attitude | Most of life is sheer attitude. You find yourself in situations you can't
change, you happen upon a streak of bad luck, but nevertheless no matter what
you do the events will still occur as they did occur. But your attitude, your
will, does not have to change, because who and what you are does not change
unless you permit yourself to change.
Now if you decide upon a course of action and then suffer the consequences,
your decision does have the power of change, because you will forever have to
acknowledge the choice and the consequences. This is different from external
events, or matters that do not originate from your own decisions. When events
result from the consequences of our own decisions we do not have the option of
attitude, because we are forever tied to the linkages that led to the events
and so therefore we must always reflect or protect against these realizations.
Sometimes this leads us to blame others or form some rigid moral paradigm
through which everything must be judged.
Events that are random do not engender this type of psychology. Which makes me
wonder, is all of human irrationality really just based upon the evolution of
some decision or set of decisions made in response to certain events?
| Sunday, 24 September 2006 at 21h 46m 51s | It's looking good |
| Saturday, 23 September 2006 at 23h 42m 43s | They knowingly broke the law. | Day one : put into 40 degree Fahrenheit room, walk in room
once every
two hours
and throw cold ice onto prisoner
Day two: put bag over head of prisoner and hog-tie prisoner, than
leave out in
hot sun all day.
Day three: put a plastic bag over the prisoner, tie the prisoner to
the
board,lift the board so prisoner is upside down, and then pour water over the
plastic or dunk into tub of water so that prisoner can feel like drowning
Day four: shackle prisoners hands upward against the wall so that the
prisoner
cannot sit down without pain
Day five: hook wires up to the testicles of the prisoner, and than
have them
stand on a box for a couple of hours at a time
Day six: put collars on prisoners necks and drag them around a court
yard,
throw them down and let dogs nip at them to tear their flesh, then beat them
with billy sticks, and even violate their anus with sticks
repeat.
Now, who is it that doesn't know the difference between torture and coerced
interrogation ?
All of these events have been documented as not just random acts, but, even
according to the military's own investigation, as part of a systematic design.
THE SUPREME COURT, ELITIST AS IT IS, AGREED. It really isn't too hard to
understand.
Bush broke the law, and allowed Rumsfeld and the gang to violate the Geneva
conventions. Bush's own lawyer (now Attorney General) Alberto Gonzales even
warned them they were breaking the law to the point that he advised them to
prepare to be indicted.
They knowingly broke the law. Don't people go to jail for that?
| Wednesday, 20 September 2006 at 2h 1m 48s | The human food chain | We as a people need to communicate. The species has developed sounds and
visual symbols representing the sounds, both of which inately represent ideas
and specifics of the human experience. At a macro-level, each nation is tied
into itself via a panorama of multiple networks. Some of these are the media :
television, radio, newspapers, books, and magazines. Some of these are
institutional : churches, schools, governments, buildings and businesses. Some
of these are physical : family, friends, the president, the store clerk, the
police officer, the fireman, and whatever genre, race, or stereotype we care to
cast the human species into.
All of these "tie-ins" to the culture are just a larger version of our species
ability to communicate in complex, abstract ways. Birds have their songs, cats
their meows, and dogs their barks, but these all convey merely a small number
of basic emotions without much depth or elaboration. Nothing can be comparable
to the human vocabularies, of which there are more than 250 basic grammatical
structures across the entire planet. Humans even celebrate the differences
through art, where there are various card playing pets seated around a card
table, or fishes able to talk and organize complicated excursions with many
different ocean species. Being the dominant Earth species, we are just walking
apes who have colonized all the land masses. And now, as we stare at
stereotyped roles on the television sitcoms, as we collectively sift through
the hysterical and the inane in the ether of the communication food chain, we
are really no different than fish living in some 12th dimensional beings
aquarium, waiting for the small flakes that get put in the water twice a day.
| Tuesday, 19 September 2006 at 0h 25m 12s | The Championship game | The 2006 Nawlins battle will be determined this week. My team is the nawlins
napsters.
Already today, my 3rd Baseman, Aramis Ramirez of the Chicago Cubs, is 2 for 2,
with a home run and 4 rbi's. I hope this trend continues. You never know.
Aramis might get only 2 more singles the rest of the week. That's baseball.
Not like anyone else cares but me. I'll post the winner next week.
| Saturday, 16 September 2006 at 20h 43m 48s | We can do what we want |
| Saturday, 16 September 2006 at 17h 41m 15s | You are what you eat | You know what television entertainment
programming
really
is ...
manufactured
populism, because rather than
stimulating people to occupy their time with something that is self-initiated,
the television is meant
to merely pacify its victims while it feeds your mind with fantasies and
illusions. Take a panoply of gender stereotypes, cast them into a few
predetermined roles, and then pack weeks, months, even years of time into a
single hour. And what you see is a suggested reality, created by the vision of
individuals because the camera cannot convey the exactitude of the moment.
This can be a highly brilliant, insightful depiction of life, but instead the
vast machine of Hollywood manufactures a daily ether world of heroes, villainy,
and everyday people.
Which reminds me of that stupid contemporary commercial of a family with
glowing TV
ratings on their head that is currently shown in between the baseball games I
stream on broadband. How ridiculous is the premise that TV is something we
have
to "protect" our kids from, because they might get exposed to the raunchy,
sexist real world. Certainly those magazines on the rack at the Supermarket
check-out line don't have barely clothed women advertizing their cleavage.
Certainly the average commercial isn't skirting the edge between blatant
promiscuity and overt pornography. So from what exactly are the children being
saved?
To me, this is just another PR campaign by the cable companies. You know the
one's that preach the high tone of higher standards, but have yet to actually
act like they bother to enforce or ensure them. Just like McDonald's trying to
convince
everyone that their food is a great experience for the kiddies, or that their
stale coffee is exotically fresh. Fresh. I love that word. As if the very
notion that something being "fresh" makes it better or different than the norm,
rather than something you should actually take for granted.
Ah ... Nothing like fresh bad coffee from a smiling uniformed and underpaid
maiden who started work at 4 O'Clock in the morning so that lazy, indolent
people
can drive thru and pick up some phosphate enhanced processed food product.
Which is exactly what I generally think of 99.9999% of Hollywood : fresh bad
coffee and really unhealthy food. Every year the tube networks pump out the
shows, even changing them
frequently to keep the content "fresh", but it's like a ride at the amusement
park where you remain seated the entire time absorbing the content. Gradually
this content becomes the everyday background noise, since all that is absorbed
by the mind becomes one with that mind by the very essence of the contact. We
cannot separate our self from what we experience with the senses. The notion
of being able to "control" this experience is ridiculous, because you cannot
separate yourself from your experience. If the phenomenom goes into your eyes
and ears, your mind has registered a recognition, and your thoughts have to
interact with that which has been recognized. We are, we become, what we
choose to imbibe.
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