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Editorial

+ - Why Open Source Won't Save You->

Submitted by
Anti Globalism
Anti Globalism writes "Cults appear everywhere today; in religion, politics, business and media. Technology is not an exception. What defines a cult is the insistence that a certain way, right or wrong, can be the only way for characteristics independent of its effect. What matters in the real world is how well something works, but cults replace this with a symbol or doctrine.

Open source was originally the idea that knowledge about software programming should be shared within a community, independent of financial reward, to compete with the costly corporate software out on the market. So far, really smart. What's happened over these last years is that the open source community has slowly transformed into a cult phenomenon that dogmatically divides software up into two binary categories: open source (good) and closed source (evil).

Read more"
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Editorial

+ - What Forest Fires And Wars Have In Common->

Submitted by
Anti Globalism
Anti Globalism writes "Forest fires are dangerous, and a threat to the well-being of ancient and beautiful forests. This is obvious to anyone who has even seen a fire rage out of control, even if only on a television screen. The flames grow higher and seem to take on their own life, destroying all in their path with recklessness. Flames have no emotions and therefore can not be reasoned with, so the clear solution must be that the responsibility rests on the shoulders of man to save the inspirational plants and wildlife that are in immediate danger.

The men and women taking on this task are some of the bravest that this society knows, for they have made careers out of running into burning buildings to save any life they can. They now face an incredible duty that most of them are probably unfamiliar with; running into a burning forest rather than a building. Their training and honorable courage is no match for the capabilities of flame spreading through a dry forest, despite the best effort they can give this fire will rage at its own pace and will stop...just...whenever it stops...

Read more"
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Editorial

+ - In The Search For Status Quo->

Submitted by
Anti Globalism
Anti Globalism writes "One of the most difficult challenges for a leader is to know how many rules you should enforce, in order to maintain order and discipline in a group of people. There is no absolute guideline how to do this right and the results will vary among cultures and individuals. Parents face the same dilemma every day: if you let your child do whatever it feels like doing, it will end up being driven over by a car or kidnapped by some local lunatic. If you restrict it too much, that will eventually back lash when it grows older and realizes that you destroyed its childhood.

Human nature is very simple: in any given environment where's there's a group of individuals living together, certain norms and principles will be established over time, that seem to benefit the group as a whole. This may of course also include taboos and not all rules are necessarily stated in public; in fact, if you think about the social norms in our society today, they consist of quiet agreements that all people assume you agree with and follow: don't walk naked to work, stand in line to the concert, avoid wearing the Nazi uniform at school etc.

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The Internet

+ - Web 2.0 And The Myth of 'Free Media'->

Submitted by
Anti Globalism
Anti Globalism writes "The corporate media is rapidly losing consumers. Thanks to a society obsessed with the individual, people today are no longer satisfied with simply consuming. They want to produce, vote, rate and share. Open Source fans clap their hands together and talk about the new "free media," pointing to examples like Wikipedia. Despite this development, the quality of media content online is not increasing — why?

Most people are not interested in communicating an idea, they want to be the center of attention. Wikipedia-writers play academics, bloggers document their oh-so-fascinating bourgeois lifestyles and MySpacers exercise their ego together with digital friends. The result is at best a social re-hash of what the corporate media has been promoting for years: consumer products, popularity contests and political fashion.

Read more"
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Privacy

+ - Facebook deletes school shooter group (twice)-> 2

Submitted by
i love heavy metal
i love heavy metal writes "After an online group dedicated to praise for the ideas of the Jokela High School Shooter Pekka-Eric Auvinen grew rapidly and became the talk of the net, Facebook administrators pulled the plug. In doing so, they did what the gunman predicted would occur when he said "most of you are too arrogant and closed-minded to understand."

http://www.corrupt.org/articles/politics/brett_stevens/facebook_deletes_group_supporting_auvinen%2C_corrupt_replies"
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Editorial

+ - Jokela High School Shooter Was Right!->

Submitted by
Anti Globalism
Anti Globalism writes "We support the school shooter Pekka-Eric Auvinen because he shattered the illusion in which most people live. The illusion is that our society is moral, progressive and moving toward a positive goal. The reality is that we are living in delusion, we are doing it for our own selfish sense of status, and that the end result will be to breed ourselves into stupidity, to pollute the planet and kill its beautiful wildlife, and in the meantime, to bore ourselves to death with categorical rules and mirthless function.

In our view, doom awaits us all anyway, so those who are killed now die as symbols of the discontent. This discontent is not widely spread because most people have the attention spans of gnats. However, we have chosen to build our society on the idea of the individual as king over truth, which allows the idiots and parasites among us to run our society into the ground, because if only 1% of people see why something is necessary, and it's not popular or profitable, it gets ignored — even if it is reality. We commend you to the philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, Theodore Kaczynski, Pentti Linkola, Rene Guenon, Vijay Prozak and Julius Evola for more information.

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Editorial

+ - On The Importance Of Individuality->

Submitted by
Anti Globalism
Anti Globalism writes "Too many people today don't know who they are and as a result, construct a false image of themselves to fit in with the rest of society. They feel feel lonely, alienated and depressed. Many get caught up in bad relationships but feel too weak or afraid to leave their partners and move on with life. They become trapped inside a circle of negative emotions and as soon as they feel there's a glimpse of hope, reality reminds them of what it means to feel hurt or let down.

We live in a society that is obsessed with social activities, mass gatherings and crowd events. Many grow up without any sense of real identity and as a result, they associate themselves with people or products to form their own "unique" lifestyle. Clothes, cars, music, politics, friends — they're all just social tools to climb up on the social ladder and become popular.

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Editorial

+ - Karmic Tar Babies: The Decline Of Our Civilization->

Submitted by
Anti Globalism
Anti Globalism writes "The old tale, attributed to African-Americans but probably invented by a Mongolian copyriter in New York, describes the tar baby left out as a lure for angry people. A tar baby is symbolic because it looks human and because it won't answer you, it can make you angry. When you then start hitting the thing, all it does is stick to you in increasing degrees, like a trap.

In the lore of ancient religions, a distinction was made between transcendental goals (honor, beauty, glory, balance) and karmic ones, or those things important only to people obsessed with material success and status. Most people are caught up in the karmic whirlwind, and so they agonize over the objects they own, their job status, who wore what at what party, etc. People ensnared in such karmic bullshit constitute parasites and obstructions to those with any higher goal, not in the least because a karmically-minded person "cannot see" the value in a higher goal.

Read more"
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Editorial

+ - Tropa de Elite: Pragmatism In A Modern World->

Submitted by
Anti Globalism
Anti Globalism writes "I recently watched the Brazilian movie Tropa de Elite that everyone's been talking about lately. After having seen it, it's easy to understand why people feel so upset about the subject and according to a Brazilian friend, this is only the tip of the iceberg.

The movie is about BOPE, or Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais, an elite group of the Military Police in Rio de Janeiro. It depicts the violent downfall of a decaying Brazil; criminal syndicates rule the towns with drugs and guns, poor people starve while rich people thrive off the corruption and collect whatever's left from the chaos. The State can no longer handle the situation and ends up generating bureaucratic limits that hold the police back to do its job. Nothing works, except BOPE.

At first glimpse, most people will be offended by how this elite force works. It's ruthless and shows no mercy; it tortures children to find information, it executes criminals without arresting them, it uses the system to exploit holes and eliminate top criminals; it's on a war with society, ironically to protect it. Its function is a product of a public security system that has broken down; where the police cannot do anything, BOPE is called in to terminate the threat and secure the area. It lasts for a day, then a new drug lord has taken the place of the old.

Read more"
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Editorial

+ - Driving Blind: Why Dr. Watson Is Feared->

Submitted by
Anti Globalism
Anti Globalism writes "We were talking about the news last night, and about Dr. James Watson and how his recent statements were ill-received by the press. I don't want to comment on the content of his statements, as I'm sure others are busy making that utterly boring and fallacious by creative redefinition of the terms involved, but I want to comment on the phenomenon:

Respected scientist offers theory, and theory is rejected on the grounds that it cannot even be considered because it's offensive.

This is a variation on marketing: we cannot offer X product, because Y people will be upset and won't buy our other products (this is about the only thing that keeps industry from offering anal dildos to four-year-olds, really). We cannot mention X social event, because Y person will have a panic attack and ruin the social engagement. That's all well and good for social engagements and grocery stores, but what about science?

Read more"
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Editorial

+ - What Halloween and Samhain can teach us about life->

Submitted by
Anti Globalism
Anti Globalism writes "On Halloween, children leave home at dusk to dress up in horror costumes and collect candy from people in their neighborhood. This festival of Gaelic-pagan origin, which in ancient times meant a religious celebration of the end of the harvest season and the beginning of a cold, harsh winter, has today become centered on aspects which we ironically find less attractive: fear and death.

Halloween has transformed into a holiday for setting aside our otherwise mechanical and monotonous jobs, and somehow remindind ourselves of the otherwise more uncomfortable nature of being human. We forget our social expectations of what will happen next and allow ourselves to take joy in experiences that normally would make us flinch or angry. In a reversal of the norm, fear and death become prominent themes in a society based upon blind positivism and a dogmatic denial of human mortality.

But the presence of death and horror is not supposed to force us becoming introverted and afraid of life. We distance ourselves from this death and horror by giving it a ceremonial form that is harmless, or weakened, like the germs in an innoculation, so that we can keep on hearing about war, chaos and suffering on the news and assuming it will stay far away. Death isn't what happens to us. Denial is.

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Editorial

+ - Cure Infections With Garlic->

Submitted by
Anti Globalism
Anti Globalism writes "This super-food is one of Nature's most miraculous remedies. Until recently, the medical establishment succeeded in sidelining garlic's reputed benefits, belittling them as being little more than folklore. But now it is becoming apparent that garlic is such an effective cure for so many ailments that if it was man-made it would be a much prized prescription drug, being even more effective than penicillin.

Garlic cures many infections and prevents them, being both anti-bacterial and anti-viral. Also garlic lowers cholesterol, thins the blood (protecting against blood clots) as well as preventing and curing several forms of cancer. Garlic has been used from the earliest historical times for treating tumors and numerous other conditions.

It is generally a good idea to use garlic instead of antibiotics to cure infections — unless they are life-threatening. I regularly eat one large raw clove of garlic a day, with food as a preventative measure against many illnesses, but if you have symptoms — colds, flu, fever, etc then increase this to up to several cloves a day with food until symptoms subside.

(Read more here)"
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It's funny. Laugh.

+ - Museum Saves Liberals From Creationism->

Submitted by
Anti Globalism
Anti Globalism writes "Washington, DC (CoNN) — Liberals were saved from adopting creationism in the wake of Nobel Prize Winner James Watson's declaration that races were unequal in intelligence, causing many to reject science outright and turn to theology. Luckily, the British Museum intervened with its strong condemnation of Watson for assuming that science can exist apart from social pressure.

Jerry "Shameless" McMurty, a New York City progressive coffee talk activist, led a spirited discussion at Asteroid Shambles, a coffee pub for progressive-minded people in the Tribeca area. "We were all up in arms about it, and then one of my hip cats pointed out the vast amount of scientific research suggesting that not just races, but social classes and individuals, are inequal. And then I was like, 'If science holds back progress, let's try something else.'"

"Something else" turned out to be creationism, which in McMurty's words was "the only peer-reviewed alternative to science." The Progressive Creationist (PC) movement thus began and was immediately hailed by all nearby as a positive future.

"I was like, it's the holy grail of modern city progressives," said Dugash O'Riley as he got another mixed flavor fair trade latte from the bar. "But then we heard the news that the museum had stopped that evil scientist Watson guy, and then he got fired, so we were like, if science can give in to progressive social pressure, we're just going to redefine science instead."

Down the street at St. Christopher's Cathedral, Catholics gathered to pray for the souls of those involved. "I may be a working middle class woman with no college degree," said Edna O'Grady as she lit a votive candle, "but it doesn't take much intelligence to see that those poor neurotic people are lost souls turning their backs on a forgiving God, even if He does hate abortion so.""
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"Being against torture ought to be sort of a bipartisan thing." -- Karl Lehenbauer

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