Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
The Matrix

Journal Journal: It's Only A Movie

' LIZA
                                    Where'd you get your subscribers?

JERRY
                                    I put an ad on a computer bulletin
                                    board. I log on at the library so
                                    I can't be traced.

LIZA
                                    Well, I've been tracking them down
                                    all morning.

JERRY
                                    You haven't been bothering them,
                                    have you?

LIZA
                                    They're dead. Four out of five
                                    anyhow. All in the last 24 hours.
                                    One car accident, two heart
                                    attacks and a stroke.

JERRY
                                    Jesus... It's my fault. They drew
                                    a black line over me and now I'm
                                    passing it on.
                                                  (realizes)
                                    I'm passing it to you, too.

LIZA
                                    I'll be fine. Let's worry about
                                    Henry Finch. P.O. Box in St.
                                    Louis. He's the last on the list.
                                    I haven't been able to reach him
                                    yet.

JERRY
                                    Maybe you better not try... I
                                    worked so hard to keep quiet.
                                    Like a mouse. I should have
                                    realized.

LIZA
                                    Realized what?

JERRY
                                    Henry Finch. That they monitor
                                    everything. That it was only a
                                    matter of time. And now four
                                    people are dead.

Liza reaches into her pocket, takes out the newsletter.

LIZA
                                    Elaborate on 'they,' okay?

JERRY
                                    There are all kinds of groups, all
                                    kinds of initials. But they're
                                    all part of two warring factions.
                                    One: families that have held
                                    wealth for centuries.
                                    They want one thing. Stability.
                                    Group Two: the boat rockers.
                                    Eisenhower's military industrial
                                    complex. They want instability.
                                    It's a trillion dollar a year
                                    business. When there isn't a hot
                                    war, they make a cold one.

                                                                LIZA
                                    Cold War's over, Jerry.

JERRY
                                    So now they feed us terrorists.
                                    To create fear. How much do you
                                    think an airport security system
                                    goes for? Then multiply it by
                                    every airport in the country.

LIZA
                                    And you think Group One is at war
                                    with Group Two.
http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/conspiracy-theory.html

Shark

Journal Journal: Burn, Baby, Burn! 1

"Sustainability" is, as far as I can see, a project designed to keep this culture - this lifestyle - afloat. The modern human economy is an engine of mass destruction. Of course, I am conflicted about this. I live at the heart of this machine; like you, I am a beneficiary of it. If it falls apart, I will probably suffer, and I don't want to. ...

I don't think any "climate movement" is going to reverse the tide of history, for one reason: We are all climate change. It is not the evil "1%" destroying the planet. We are all of us part of that destruction. This is the great, conflicted, complex situation we find ourselves in. I am climate change. You are climate change. Our culture is climate change. And climate change itself is just the tip of a much bigger iceberg, if you'll pardon the terrible but appropriate pun. If we were to wake up tomorrow to the news that climate change were a hoax or a huge mistake, we would still be living in a world in which extinction rates were between 100 and 1000 times natural levels and in which we have managed to destroy 25 percent of the world's wildlife in the last four decades alone."

http://grist.org/climate-energy/i-withdraw-a-talk-with-climate-defeatist-paul-kingsnorth/

Medicine

Journal Journal: Gimme Gimme Penicillin! 3

China 'seals off' town after man dies of bubonic plague
"A Chinese town has been sealed off and 151 people placed in quarantine since last week after a man died of bubonic plague, state media said Tuesday.

The 30,000 people living in Yumen in the northwestern province of Gansu are not being allowed to leave, and police at roadblocks on its perimeter are telling motorists to find alternative routes, state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) said.

Other reports said that earlier this month the 38-year-old victim had found a dead marmot, a small furry animal which lives on grasslands and is related to the squirrel.

He chopped it up to feed his dog but developed a fever the same day. He was taken to hospital after his condition worsened and died last Wednesday."

https://au.news.yahoo.com/a/24523564/china-seals-off-town-after-man-dies-of-bubonic-plague/

The Matrix

Journal Journal: Property is Moral Opposite of Liberty 10

Think about that, while you make absolute positions...

"...Liberty, as defined in its truest negative sense, is freedom from external restraint. This, along with the principle of self-ownership, commands that nobody shall have the right to act on the body of another without their consent. But "property rights" as Gobry slyly calls them gives people precisely that right. For a right to property is not a right over a piece of the world, but rather a right to act on the bodies of others: to attack and externally restrain those bodies without consent.

In a world that respects liberty, people are free to do whatever they'd like, provided they do not act on the body of another (e.g. externally restrain it). This requires that people may walk about the world as they please, grabbing and utilizing any of its various pieces and resources as they go. No person may stop them from doing so because such stopping would impose an external restraint on their body, a destruction of their negative liberty.

Yet, this kind of liberty-destroying external restraint is precisely what property ownership is. In fact, it is the only thing that property is: a social relation of violent exclusion wherein the "owner" has claimed a right to attack other human beings if they try to act on a particular piece of the world. Claiming a "property right" does not change the piece of world that it is meant to attach to, nor the person claiming it. It merely advertises a terrifying threat: everyone else's pre-existing liberty to use this piece of the world is hereby extinguished at my violent hands whether they consent to have their liberty so destroyed or not."

http://mattbruenig.com/2014/07/23/does-nature-command-the-destruction-of-all-human-liberty/

The Internet

Journal Journal: Was the Internet Created for Covert Domestic Surveillance?

"From its creation by DoD contracts and grants to research institutions, there have been aspersions cast by those easily dismissed as "fringe" commentators, on the nefarious, or at least covert, motivation to create the Internet. Conspiracy theory may have been met by reality in recent months with now commonplace reporting, first by Wikileaks and later, in the more extensive Edward Snowden revelations. It is still almost canon, that NSA mass-surveillance and warrantless information analysis occurred through coopting the burgeoning Internet, and diverting traffic in a way that is counter to the ideals of its creators and promoters. But what if the social, commercial Internet were always intended as a sort of giant honeypot? The idea would still seem farfetched, if it weren't recently disclosed by William Binney that the NSA is recording 80% of all US phone conversations â" not simply metadata. Closer examination of the record shows that ARPAnet was being used to clandestinely gather information on the legitimate activities of US citizens â" and transmit the information to the US Army Intelligence Command NSA â" as far back as 1968! According to articles published in 1975 by MIT in "The Tech":

  "via the ARPANET, a computer network connecting more than 50 government agencies and universities throughout the country. The network is funded by the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA)... The information, according to intelligence sources, was transferred and stored at the headquarters of the National Security Agency (NSA), at Fort Meade, Maryland. The Army files were transmitted on the ARPANET in about January 1972, sources say, more than two years after the material â" and the data banks maintained at the [Army's] Fort Holabird facility â" were ordered destroyed."

MIT officials were worried 40 years ago, about this abuse of interconnected TCP communications and the complicity of their own research scientists. These concerns arose at the height of the Watergate fallout and downfall of President Nixon for illegal wiretapping and information theft allegations. The danger of Government "record keeping" was outlined by Senator Sam Ervin, in an address to MIT that was also profiled in the same publication. Clearly, this did not begin in the last decade, and clearly pre-dates the 2001 "Global War on Terror" pretext. It is important to remember, the NSA was an almost unknown agency at this time, and was chartered to strictly forbid intel on US citizens and those dwelling within US borders."

User Journal

Journal Journal: Circular Refuge on reddit 5

It's a happening place. There are upwards of 3, maybe 4 posts a day!
You should join us, if you like.

http://www.reddit.com/r/CircularRefuge
(message mods to join; can't let the riffraff on reddit in! Just our very own special riffraff.)

Slashdot Top Deals

Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle. -- Steinbach

Working...