That's not really fair.

Corporate health care and food and drug systems have a proven track record of making everybody sick for profit, and the laws of competition simply don't work as promised in preventing this. If they did work, then Americans wouldn't be so fat and sick. At least with government there is the idea that control and regulation are in the hands of the public.

That's the dream, anyway. The reality is that the military/industrial interests have taken over the government, so democracy is a big fail.

But the original idea itself was sound. It's too bad that the real world is corrupt to the core. Thank-goodness for this coming ice age and the comets and all the other stuff which will be wiping the slate clean!

-FL

Actually, I'm glad the two of you posted. I can just add it to the list of items which seem to indicate that parts of North America are being affected differently by these weird weather patterns than is Europe.

-FL

Until you spend some time on the lonely side of the podium, it's hard to comment with a full scope of knowledge on this question.

Classes where laptops are left closed result in much more engaged and dynamic classes. Those where they are open result in the "room full of zombies" effect. There's a reason it's so annoying to talk with somebody who looks away and digs in a purse or engages elsewhere when it's your turn to speak. The bio-feedback loop collapses and the teacher might as well post lectures on YouTube and students post questions in an on-line forum somewhere. Heck; on YouTube you can pause and re-play stuff. And it's cheaper!

Universities were built and people attend them at great cost in order to assemble like-minds in one place so that everybody can benefit from those aspects of humanity which thrive on face to face communication, (also earned at great cost through the trials of evolution). There are many layers of communication taking place, both subtle and extreme, which bring a room alive when people engage in each other in meat-space, but which are stripped away when it's done through a computer screen. This doesn't mean that the virtual world is without benefit. It's not; computers are a boon. But the virtual world can be attended any time, any place you can flip open a laptop. It was built to simulate the grand effect of a campus assembly. But if you are actually attending a college assembly. . ?

Laptops need to be used responsibly. Turn off animations and distracting screen savers in respect of the people sitting near you. If you're going to take notes, then sure, do so, but have the courtesy to limit it to notes and stay engaged in discussions. If you need to look something up to aid the discussion, then sure, do that, but in general things work best when all eyes and ears are on whoever is speaking. If you want to play on Facebook or dip into a game, then that's fine by me, but please physically leave class first because you're literally sucking the life out of the room by removing your mind and leaving a vacant corpse in your chair. It's creepy.

Ideally, I like to have wifi and fluorescent lights killed and windows open for fresh air. I also like to rearrange the chairs so that we can all see each other to better engage. Do that, and everybody wakes up, but these days it's very hard to scrub an environment of all the fuzz designed to keep us zoned out.

-FL

It doesn't matter what course you choose to take. If you leave the psychopaths in positions of power, then whatever system is used will only lead to further misery.

These problems can only be solved by the recognizing and removal of non-humans. I'd start at the banking level, remove the psychopaths from that system, undo usery, and then work down.

If the ability to experience empathy is a pre-requisite before one can be considered human, then Psychopaths are not human. They are a predator population which has embedded itself at the highest levels of power and social control. If you want to treat them kindly, then that's fine, but whatever happens, they need to be removed from their positions or we will continue to live in a state of war, poverty and misery.

-FL

I like your version of reality better than the one I live in. I'd sign up in a heartbeat if I felt you could deliver. :(

-FL

Thank you for the advice, but I'm going to ignore it. In fact, the more I learn, the more fascinating the world becomes and the less apathetic I grow. I certainly don't disagree that governments are incapable of imagination, but I don't see how that proves your point; 9/11 was utter Bruce Willis shlock designed for a low-brow TV addicted nation.

Maybe your books, people, experiences, practices and modes of thinking need to be updated?

Or maybe you need to avoid tap water? Fluoride poisoning is one of the leading causes of apathy.

-FL

Wrong. Scientific method is such a necessity because so many people refuse to do anything more than pay it lip service.

If you stop putting on a nice civilly compliant act of knowledge seeking and go and actually seek some knowledge, you'll be much richer for the experience. You'll be ostracized, of course, but only by a bunch of cognitively dissonant muggles utterly unworthy of any respect whatsoever, so who cares?

-FL

This reads like "Project Blue Book" crap, which was later admitted by those involved to be nothing more than a public relations lie factory.

A cursory flip through these documents reveals them to be a sampling of sleep-worthy accounts, (points of light in the sky which are easily identifiable as satellites or other mundane objects) and a collection of letters written by school children and un-balanced people along with the patient responses from overwrought defense officers charged with the duty of replying to this nonsense. -Along with a bunch of internal memos where clipped newspaper articles were circulated among government staffers.

Either New Zealand's military, police and air traffic officials are blissfully excluded from the rest of the planet which has lived through hundreds of events of a far more dramatic nature and which include multiple witness accounts including people who are not allowed to omit documenting their experiences.., or this whole release is carefully edited spin.

I mean, come on. This is published by a government! As anybody who has experienced anything to do with any government anywhere, the people involved must exist in a state filled with 800 pound gorillas and the game-theory proven reality is that never, ever sticking your neck out is simply the only way to survive as a civil servant.

The only interesting point in all of this is that somebody somewhere decided that spin was in fact needed. THAT means there is a fear that the population was threatening to become a little too informed and needed to be tucked back in.

I'd say that Richard Dolan is largely responsible for this response, and he's been soundly dealt with over the last year or so; a man who was once a premier UFO researcher of impeccable academic quality and grit has been given quite the mind-fuck lately with a lot of weird influences introduced into his life. (Creepy psyops people). He's been seduced into doing those idiotic TV shows for heaven's sake!

This kind of release would help along the impression that his work is just a bunch of bunk.

Oh well.

-FL

Somebody is clearly writing this nonsense.

If their insight into the reality of what makes the human mind react is this thin, then I can only imagine that the punchline/plot-twist/grand-finale is going to be just as campy and groan-worthy.

If they hadn't already softened up (force-fed) their audience with twenty years of the most embarrassingly and increasingly low-brow circuses humanity is capable of viewing without actually drooling into their popcorn, I'd venture to guess that nobody would buy any of this farce.

-FL

If you want to see how much traction false media stories can achieve, just look at pretty much every second news item.

This is why discussion forums are so important; so that people from diverse backgrounds can network and compare notes and at least make an attempt to figure out what is really going on.

News stories are usually, I find, only valuable in terms of meta-information which can be used to extrapolate reality. Deliberately poisoning the mix with lame information is nothing new, the only difference here is that in this particular case, we've been let in on the starting point of the corruption.

-FL

You just described half the people I've known over my lifetime. Why would I expect socially advanced humans to grace the screen just because they happen to be in space?

And that was the very reason I couldn't stand BSG. Petty, self-serving, over-wrought people doing stupid things. I know art imitates life, but I'm loath to watching sad people do painful things on my computer screen when I can do that just by walking around downtown. It takes work to be happy and successful in life, and I want to see some decent examples, not a bunch of fictitious people mired in misery. I want to see people being their very best. That's why STTNG was so great! (Though, those old episodes seem extremely dated and abrupt today).

SGU, with all its high production values, was a huge leap over the super-fluff SG series, but where it won out in increased attention to detail, both social and technical, it lost through being so hopelessly derivative. It seemed like a production company's attempt to cobble together aspects from fan favored items, (BSG in a big way, and that Summer Glau clone who was even playing a character like River and that Terminator). The whole thing was disingenuous. Any good things in it were accidental bits of story which evolved on their own, though so many of the script ideas were Star Trek re-treads asking the question, "What if inadequate, burned-out miserable people were faced with Star Trek problems? Maybe the public will like that. They sure ate it up in BSG."

The one thing which did interest me was a bit of meta-story.

If the old SG1 McGyver crew were to have been dumped on the Destiny, they would have wrapped up the whole adventure in one or two episodes. They wouldn't have gotten stuck out in space for months on end. Why? Because they were happy and brilliant mythical figures and they would have found solutions. There was an episode where Young was being upbraided by McGyver for dragging his ass on the mission, and I was thinking, "Yeah, if McGyver had been there, none of this crap would have happened." -Now, I know it was not done on purpose, but it struck me that maybe when characters are happy, advanced and brilliant, their adventures just seem fluffier and more up-beat as a direct result of the character's outlook. Perhaps misery is linked to ones level of social advancement? I mean, honestly, can you see any of the old SG1 crew acting like selfish, whiny pricks?

Me neither.

The annoying part was that just as the characters in the show began showing some decent qualities, just as they were pulling together, and just as they were beginning to question the nature of reality itself, that's when the show got canned.

-FL

Those who haven't yet figured out that FOX News is for fools are, regrettably, too stupid to live, as is currently being demonstrated by the all-powerful engine of Reality which is at this very moment gobbling up your rights, homes, savings, jobs, food and fairly soon, your bodies.

So moving right along. . .

While FOX News ranks at the very tippy-top on the American Propaganda charts, it remains a further regrettable truth that NO news on TV is any damned good. There are huge realities which the human media shies away from like a powerless mother incapable of dealing a child's disobedience, or perhaps the horrible truth of a molesting father. In the same way, the media pretends a whole raft of astonishing truths simply do not exist, all in order to keep this weird little charade we call, "normal" puffed up with just enough air to keep all the slaves limping toward the death camps.

The result is that our entire society is completely mind-fucked. Surviving day to day in a state of cognitive dissonance where everybody is either acting with a fake smile or is so lost that they really believe their actions and minds are their own. We must pity those fools; They are the ones who spend time actually watching FOX News with a straight face.

-FL

Well. . , I don't know how I'd define "Insanity" exactly, but a certain level of cognitive dissonance certainly seems to be required to enter into military work. But it's a state, I think, that one can emerge from.

In any case, laws and procedures don't make something sane. They just make it easy to feel like one is part of a rational entity while performing insane functions. I'm sure the cells in a mad man's muscles are little different than those in any other person.

Though in this instance, some of those cells seemed to be getting quizzical looks on their faces. I noted the part in the article where, "The defense official said blocking the New York Times was a misinterpretation of military guidance to avoid visiting websites that post classified material."

But as for Slashdot spiraling downward into the depths of ignorance. . .

I would very much like to argue with you on that point. I can't! I think it's a symptom of several larger problems. Fortunately, there are numerous examples of Slashdotters who are moving in the opposite direction. For some, seeing the world sink provides exactly the kind of Grist for the Mill which feeds the machine of awareness.

-FL

I'm sure the first typeset stories were pretty impressive. People probably wanted to see them and go, "Ooh. Ahhh!" simply for the production techniques.

While that was probably a fun period, it's also fun being able to live in a world awash with books where the quality of story-telling is the important thing, not the typesetting.

-FL

You want to know where the next terrorist act will take place?

Just ask the Mossad.

Fer feck's saik!

Is anybody really still fooled by this bullshit? Because, as we know, governments NEVER plan in secret or attempt to manipulate the populace.

Why haven't those monsters been hauled out by their scrotums yet?

Sheesh.

-FL