LOL
“we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.â€
- Sarah Palin, Socialist Extraordinaire (quote from 2 weeks prior to her vice-presidential nomination)
“I am shocked, shocked I say to learn there’s gambling in this establishment!”
- Alan Greenspan?
Nutty
This girl, while working for the McCain campaign, made up this whole story about how a mugger beat her up and then after seeing her McCain bumper sticker, carved a B into her face (B for Obama? Shouldn’t it be an O?). Now, making up the story is nutty, but what gets me is that she claims she doesn’t even remember carving the B into her own face or blacking her own eye.
Elections really bring out the best in people.
PingPress.FTW
Ping.fm’s custom URL support died sometime last week, so I’m back to PingPress.fm. Let’s see how this goes.
Inhumane
One of the lessons I came out of my bohemian era with was that people are by nature pretty inhumane, as it were. The primary theater for this stage of my self-destruction was a little place called Teviston. Not really a town, but rather an area in between more civilized areas, perhaps given a name in hopes of cordoning it off from regular folk. The sherrifs didn’t like going out there, and the only time I saw one, it was because he didn’t want us in the neighboring town, so he picked us up and drove us back out to Teviston, then dropped us off without a single question. One of the people I met out there was Bar. Bar was a difficult person to befriend. He had great difficulty speaking, and a very wry sense of humor. He was timid because so many had mocked him for his speech difficulties, but if you didn’t mind such things, as I didn’t, he was really cool to hang out with. It took me a long time to work up the nerve to find out why he had such trouble speaking (and I believe it may have been my friend N who actually found out). Bar’s parents were deaf. Bar and his older brothers were both born able to hear. However, Bar’s older brothers didn’t like him much. Whether it was sibling rivalry or just pure spite, I guess I’ll never know. Bar’s brothers didn’t hurt him through conventional means, but rather simply refused to speak to him. For years. Bar didn’t learn to speak, although his hearing was perfect, simply because his brothers arbitrarily decided that they didn’t want to bother to help him. He could speak slightly better than his parents, but it still sounded much like the speech of a deaf person. But what really got me was the deep sense of shame and defeat that he carried with him everywhere. It was like he had already decided that he could never be anything. He even had an opportunity to go teach at a school for deaf persons, but turned it down at the last minute to continue living in Teviston and doing speed. I generally despise government intervention into families (and have been on the receiving end of such), but still I wonder if Bar would have been better off had someone noticed that he wasn’t deaf. I wonder what vectors of humanity were supposed to deploy, but did not, in his brothers that kept on with this neglect for so long. I wonder what it means for humanity that when we are unfettered, we still do such things to each other.
New reception
One of the things I’ve been pondering of late is the rise in apathy. It seems to me that typically speaking, in previous times where people have grown distant from self-governance and responsibility for their world, someone would arise, and through one means or another, tear down the situation so it could start over. At the present time it would seem that this is not happening, and that reinforcement of the system is all that we can see manifesting, over and over again. I questioned this, and this is one possible answer I’ve come up with.
The collective that governs our evolution as a species is an intelligence unlike our own. In fact, it cannot perceive anything directly at all, as it is abstracted from perception by way of our egos. It directly touches each of our minds, but only can perceive surface thoughts. Because of this, it cannot distinguish between reality and fantasy, which is where the prohibitions in various religions against impure thoughts come from. Severity is meted out for these thoughts just as surely as for the act itself, because the Demiurge is blind. Because of this fact, it becomes very obvious that television, movies, and even games can, to some extent, fool the collective. Artists weave their fantasies, their hopes and dreams into the fabric of every movie, every show, every game to the extent that the collective believes these issues are being solved. So all-consuming is our drive to intake more media, that there is no longer a mechanism for the collective to discern reality.
Where do we go from here? There are several directions. We may learn to drive the collective ourselves, although I don’t consider this likely. We may create the functional equivalent of a “crash” as seems to be beginning now, where the houses of phantasm and belief begin to tumble, having been built on unstable and in some cases long gone realities. We may muddle our way somewhere in between, which I think is by far the most likely outcome. Regardless, it will be interesting to watch this vector and see where it leads.
Sound familiar?
http://ping.fm/pCSxF
“By the middle of the second century BC, the economic situation for the average Plebeian had declined significantly. The long military campaigns had forced citizens to leave their farms to fight, only to return to farms that had fallen into disrepair. The landed aristocracy began buying bankrupted farms at discounted prices, creating a situation that made it impossible for the average farmer to operate his farm at a profit. Masses of unemployed Plebeians soon began to flood into Rome, and thus into the ranks of the legislative assemblies, where their economic status usually led them to vote for the candidate who offered the most for them. A new culture of dependency was emerging, which would look to any populist leader for relief.”
From the beginning of the Roman Republic until this point in their history was 377 years. If (yes, it’s a big but imaginative if) the U.S. can be said to be at a similar point, at 232 years, then we can say that our decay rate is at 1.6x that of the Roman Republic. From the aforementioned point, it was about 85 years until Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon. That would give us about 50 years until we decay into an Empire, if we continue to decay at a similar rate.
Crackpots
http://ping.fm/Gd7w7
Well, it seems that both political campaigns have come out with the usual nonsense about how it’s the other guy’s fault (and how they tried to stop it). As usual both are also full of crap. Leaving the debunking up to better heads (please, please, please read Factcheck.org), I thought it might be more fun to compose some myths of our own about the whole thing.
The Myth
The economic crisis was triggered not by any of these fancy-schmancy economic triggers, but rather by the proliferation of telemarketing calls. It used to be the province of debtors and deadbeats to receive calls at all hours regarding ‘financial matters’, but as it has become commonplace, we have all begun to act like debtors and deadbeats. The simple act of automating telemarketing calls made it possible to make everyone in America feel like a deadbeat all in the course of an evening. Over time, the psychological effect of being told that we were deadbeats lead us to enact that behavior with poor decision making and delusional spending.
There! You see how easy it is? Go nuts!
