Loyalty without truth
is a trail to tyranny.
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a middle-aged George Washington
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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.
| Friday, 15 September 2006 at 2h 56m 27s | It's happening all over again | I get home today, and this is what I read in
the
Washington
Post [here]
U.N. inspectors investigating Iran's nuclear program angrily complained to the
Bush administration and to a Republican congressman yesterday about a recent
House committee report on Iran's capabilities, calling parts of the
document "outrageous and dishonest" and offering evidence to refute its central
claims.
Officials of the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency said in a
letter that the report contained some "erroneous, misleading and
unsubstantiated statements." The letter, signed by a senior director at the
agency, was addressed to Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the House
intelligence committee, which issued the report. A copy was hand-delivered to
Gregory L. Schulte, the U.S. ambassador to the IAEA in Vienna.
The IAEA openly clashed with the Bush administration on pre-war assessments of
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Relations all but collapsed when the
agency revealed that the White House had based some allegations about an Iraqi
nuclear program on forged documents.
After no such weapons were found in Iraq, the IAEA came under additional
criticism for taking a cautious approach on Iran, which the White House says is
trying to build nuclear weapons in secret. At one point, the administration
orchestrated a campaign to remove the IAEA's director general, Mohamed
ElBaradei. It failed, and he won the Nobel Peace Prize last year.
To great applause throughout Europe, I might add.
If you can't see where this administration is headed then God help you when you
finally see them for the lying hoodlums that they are. This administration was
100% completely wrong in Iraq. The IAEA was 100% completely right.
But go ahead, believe the chuckling man who sits in the cockpit while he and
his goons fly this plane out of orbit. When everything goes completely wrong
again you can still blame all your mistakes on the opposition -- those whiny
Democrats who warned you beforehand.
The report was never voted on or discussed by the full committee. Rep. Jane
Harman (Calif.), the vice chairman, told Democratic colleagues in a private e-
mail that the report "took a number of analytical shortcuts that present the
Iran threat as more dire -- and the Intelligence Community's assessments as
more certain -- than they are."
Privately, several intelligence officials said the committee report included at
least a dozen claims that were either demonstrably wrong or impossible to
substantiate. Hoekstra's office said the report was reviewed by the office of
John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence.
Negroponte's spokesman, John Callahan, said in a statement that his
office "reviewed the report and provided its response to the committee on July
24, '06." He did not say whether it had approved or challenged any of the
claims about Iran's capabilities.
Mind you, this is the same Negroponte who oversaw the death squad operations in
Honduras in the 1980's. Now he is director of National Intelligence, the new
agency created to oversee the operations of the CIA, FBI, and Homeland Security.
Can you say
Adolph Eichmann?
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