i'm not sure why the documentary suggests that the only options are protecting the calf or predatory behaviour. rather, the more obvious explanation is competition over resources. you'd imagine that the orca would be more interested in the seals, and are just trying to scatter the sharks out. if they can get some food out of it, great. but that's not really the point.

it's just more evidence that orcas are evolving to occupy the niche that sharks currently occupy. nor is this shocking - the era of mammal diversification and replacement is the era we're continuing to live through. bye sharks...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ay4xnI216iY

i know the topic is generally understood to be l ron hubbard, but i think it's an oversimplification to state as much - i don't think there's a specific target. it's about the martyr archetype, in general. and, i think it's actually very easily applied to a number of targets that aren't generally spoken of - politicians, the military and perhaps the crux of american culture, itself.

the song itself is pretty obvious, but the line that's always struck me as most important in determining it's intended target is this one:

don't you step out of line

that's military language, and evokes the imagery of an officer attacking his superior. it's always led me to the conclusion that this is some kind of an anti-war song - a criticism of american war culture, and this idea of the soldier as martyr.

you know, it's really remarkable. it doesn't matter what the policies are. it doesn't matter what the evidence is. the reality is that obama has deported more immigrants than any other president, and by a large order of magnitude. when he says he's putting more staff at the border to keep the kids out, his record supports that.

the media doesn't care. it's stuck in these reagan-era narratives. to the media, obama is walter mondale.

that's scary for two reasons.

1) it suggests that the narrative is fixed. that is, that the media will not allow the two party system to change. not even when the narrative has nothing to do with reality.
2) because the narrative is fixed, the perspective will never change, regardless of the policies. that gives both parties free hands on certain concerns, that everybody will just flat out ignore.

it's really remarkable. it really is.

this is such capitalist propaganda. they even put the atonal russian strings in. it's all over the show.

02-04-2015: la dispute - full show (detroit)

their music:
https://www.ladispute.org/

review:
http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/shows/2015/04/02.html

canada is a relatively small market, compared to asia. the arguments about cost here are largely wrong - the cost has to do with shipping, not labour. these factories are mostly automated. and, if you're focusing on emerging markets, it makes sense to place your automated production facilities as close to the emerging markets as possible.

cars made in canada would be mostly made for the canadian market. given that our economy is stagnant, there's no reason to increase production. the only thing that's going to increase production in canada would be increased sales in canada, and that's not likely any time soon. even so, the increase would be relatively minor...

it really essentially has nothing to do with us, and everything to do with massive growth rates in asia and the rearrangement of production to emphasize local production, due to automation.

www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/automakers-didn-t-invest-in-new-canadian-capacity-in-2014-1.3017783

you know, the reason there's no tornadoes in china is the same reason it's so cold in siberia. i think canada might want to discuss this before any bricks get laid....

see, this is...

this appears exceedingly absurd because jello's a public figure with known positions, and strong anti-racist credentials. we know jello's position is not racist, and these guys are going after the wrong guy.

but this happens all of the time. in the end, what you're seeing here is the reason occupy evaporated. instead of getting people that agree with each other working together, you get these pointless arguments pushing divisiveness, and eventual disassociation. the artificial divisions pushed from the top overpower, and nothing gets done. eventually, people look around and realize the only people still there are white men.

it didn't happen overnight. it's the crux of organizing since 1965. and it may take as long to spin the focus back around on class as it did to spin it off it. this is deep damage. but that just means it's necessary to take a good, hard look at it.

it's not an ideal tactic, but i think that the left needs to grow a bit of a backbone with this, that organizing groups need to take the initiative in expulsion and ostracism of people that refuse to accept an egalitarian basis rather than let themselves continually be eaten out from the inside by these foucaldian conservatives in sheep's clothing.

and, in turn, this may help recapture the working class from the republican party, who has taken advantage of the situation and is the prime winner of the infighting.

i mean, jello was smart about this, but he's approaching it like he's getting picked on by a jock - which is telling. instant "you're bigger than me, but i can outsmart you" reaction. in this case it's true.

"he's one of them, not one of us."

that is: class. not race. with a little psychology thrown in. smart.

it wouldn't be so effective if his "opponents" had masters degrees. then you're arguing with these whacked fundamentalists. smart people. just extremists, and fully convinced.

i mean, here's the thing: i'm in the audience, and your religion can't affect me. i need a different type of argument. i have a different epistemology. but i'm not the norm.

the norm is much more swayed by the group, by appeals to emotion, etc. so, these arguments have a certain effectiveness that can't be effectively countered without using their tactics. we're not robots. i've been trained to think like one, but most people just aren't. so, then, it's like...i don't want to live through the fucking reformation...i'd rather stay home....

and, you're stuck with this just irresolvable barrier. if leftists ought to be realists, it's gotta be looked at squarely. the classical anarchists, with their enlightenment principles in science and logic, are simply not on the same side as the post-everything subjectivists, with their screwy logic, rejection of empiricism and orwellian language. either both ideas need to be put aside, which is virtually impossible as it's epistemological, or these groups need to go their separate ways.

TensaLeggy Crywank (Tensa)
American Tune's supposed to be ironic and true you mad fucks. He IS white/straight, and white people DO get advantages in this society, same with straight males.! Coming from a white person, every damn thing he said in that song is true. I think it's disgusting as well, how race/gender preference really does impact our ways of living as they do.

deathtokoalas
it's statistically false. the most privileged group in north america is east asians, followed by south asians. northern european whites are in the middle, with blacks and latinos and native americans on the bottom.

the model was developed by black academics in the southeastern us to try and understand the consequences of american apartheid. it works well enough in that limited context. you could also apply it reasonably well to, say, south africa, which has a similar history.

the problem is when you take something with an extremely limited intended application and try to blow it up to a general, universal rule. it happens all the time. and you can't blame the authors.

there's just a lot of morons out there.

bakerbrown6
+deathtokoalas One question: which group in North America has the most money, most members in congress and the most influence?

deathtokoalas
+bakerbrown6 these people are slaves to the investor class. bankers. pointing to the composition of congress as "privilege" is like arguing that workers must run society because they do all the work.

the investor class is mostly inherited wealth, and is a lot more diverse than you may realize.

to put it differently, the investor class will run the candidate it believes has the highest chance of winning. if the majority of politicians are white, it does not suggest that white people have more power in any real sense. it merely suggests that they are a plurality in most places, and running white people is the best way for the investor class to get votes. the investor class will readily invert this logic by running candidates of any colour and gender combination, when it is likely to maximize votes.

bakerbrown6
+deathtokoalas"If the majority of politicians are white, it does not suggest that white people have more power in any real sense"... no? I guess there is a way to spin anything haha. You don't have to go back too far in American history when people of color had NO rights. There are many who would love to go back.

deathtokoalas
+bakerbrown6 i want to be clear that i'm not rejecting the model outright, i'm just pointing out that it's a specific model and not a universal one. and, the people that built the model would acknowledge that. it's specifically meant to deal with the consequences of slavery, as they applied to the southeastern united states. they simply weren't interested in trying to describe a universal social phenomenon.

so, if you want to talk about white privilege in atlanta or dallas or st. louis? yeah, that's a real thing. it's a consequence of the legacy of slavery. but, if you start crunching data in chicago or detroit (even with the recent mess) or new york or toronto or seattle, you're going to see a different picture emerge. and, this is where people start pushing back.

the exact error here is called "universalizing the specific". it's a first year logic error. but you see it quite commonly in academia, especially in the social sciences, where academics want to take these ideas and paint them over these large academic or geographic areas, often with poor results.

trying to apply it to canada yields particularly bad results. i know it's called "american song", but you hear the same ideas coming from activists here. the reality? there are so few blacks in canada, that there hasn't even been a real opportunity to systemically discriminate against them. number of blacks descended from slaves in canada? statistically insignificant. blacks make up a few percentage points of the overall population, but almost all of them are highly educated recent immigrants directly from africa or the caribbean. statistically, they're actually slightly privileged due to the immigration rules requiring high levels of education for entry. so, you just can't apply a model meant to explain the legacy of slavery to a country with no serious legacy of slavery. but, people do it anyways because they want to universalize this specific idea.

(to be clear: yes, there was slavery in canada. but it was short lived, and it left almost no descendants. certainly, it didn't leave large swaths of areas of freed slaves.)

that's not to say we don't have structural racism here, but it's historically applied mostly to native americans overall - and to french canadians and east asians in specific geographic regions.

the take-away is just that critical theories are specific things, and you need to be very careful in applying them in ways that are not catered directly to the issue being analyzed.

i mean, check this out:
http://www.news.utoronto.ca/immigrants-who-outperform-mainstream-populations-us-canada-and-australia

the reason this gets scary to me is that it constructs a social hierarchy that really doesn't otherwise exist. but, if it exists in our mind, we will create it in front of us. i don't think that was the intent. but it scares me that it's often the result. worse, the type of argumentation attached to proponents of these ideas (as universals) tend to reject data and logic in favour of subjective experience. as a whole, this comes off quite orwellian.

bakerbrown6
+deathtokoalas Just curious what you might have to say about blacks in all of the jails and mostly for drugs (even though whites do more drugs)....

deathtokoalas
+bakerbrown6 yeah, that's a good example of the systemic racism that exists primarily in the american south (although the profiling exists throughout the country in different degrees). i mean, it's a backdoor to slavery. meant to replace the collapse of jim crow. the root of the problem here is in the continuation of prison labour. did you know that the prison system has a monopoly on paint in the united states? if you look at prison labourers at "workers", the united states prison system is one of the largest employers in the country. so, you get the whole school-to-prison pipeline issue.

it's just important to recognize it's a largely regional issue. we don't have any prison labour at all up here, so trying to pull that out doesn't make any sense.

i'm only going to do this once, this election cycle...

trudeau and mulcair are both horrible candidates, for their respective bases. i'd expect harper to effectively split the vote. the only really serious possibility of a change of government in the upcoming election is going to be in a highly tenuous minority situation.

let's ignore the conservative propaganda. it's useful in appealing to the base, but it has nothing to do with reality in any way.

the reality is that trudeau seems to primarily be concerned about appealing to the right, and so long as he does that he's going to bleed votes to the ndp. the liberals have not learned anything. they seem to be convinced their failures have to do with their front person, not their policies. in the end, if trudeau continues this "appeal to the right" strategy, i wouldn't expect him to perform much better than his immediate predecessors. i can only hope that they clue in to this soon...

so, as a left-leaning voter, trudeau's policies are too right-wing for me. default to mulcair, then? not so quick - he's no less of a center-right liberal. if you listen to him talk about economics, you immediately wonder why he's in the ndp. then the answer becomes clear - opportunism. and you realize you don't want to vote for this guy.

reality: all three major candidates are right-wing liberals. it's really about identity politics. and, that gives harper a major advantage.

i don't want the liberals and ndp to merge. i want one of them to re-establish the spectrum, by swinging out to the left. and, until that happens, i probably won't vote very often at all.

but, for 2015? nothing has changed. harper wins by splitting the left. again.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/tom-mulcair-s-ndp-may-be-turning-a-corner-polls-suggest-1.3016628

Apollo23
The Libs have always governed from the Right--and well in opposition they criticized from the Left..

deathtokoalas
that's an over-simplification, but the rhetoric from the younger trudeau is really dramatically different. he sounds more like a democrat, most of the time.

casino logic
fair analysis of sorts. But opting out of voting is the ultimate cop out. Apathy is contagious. I dare say that all parties count strategically on a certain level of voter apathy.

BigRocks
The only focus for voters this fall is to vote for the candidate in your riding most likely to beat the conservatives. Do some research, organize, become informed and effective voters. harper is strategizing to split the vote. We can't let this happen again. 

Organize the left vote. Vote for the your local riding candidate most likely to beat the cons.

deathtokoalas
@casino logic i think that the policies i'm seeing from the liberals & ndp present apathy as the best option. the better option at this point is to let them both crash and burn and focus on a protest party to re-establish some left-wing ideas. given that there's not going to be any difference between harper & trudeau & mulcair, anyways, there's no threat in letting harper retire...

i'm not well-positioned to actually do this. i'm an introverted artist. but, tactically, these parties ought to both be abandoned at this point. there's no future with either of them.

the greens look like the easy answer, but it's also a right-wing party, so you're looking at years of power struggles. better to start clean...

deathtokoalas
@BigRocks since 2006, the parties have positioned themselves too far to the right for it to matter. even reduction to minority isn't going to matter, because you have to expect the liberals to support them on virtual everything that makes any difference. so, please don't waste your time with this. please stop pretending that there's a future in the establishment left and support a new party, instead.

Maurice
Sounds neocon to me.LPC???

Green-PAC??? Isnt that neocon???

deathtokoalas
what i'm pointing out is that the liberal party has moved dramatically to the right over the last several decades. they were previously a social democratic party that advocated for a mixed economy, which was definitely not "neo-con". today, i think neo-con is a slight exaggeration, although they're not far from it.

the green party in canada is roughly classical liberal (it's right-libertarian in origin), and should not be confused with the more left-wing green parties in the united states and europe. neo-con, or neo-liberal as we tend to say in canada and europe, would not be a very good description.

mid 30s and virtually everybody assumes i'm not legal. i was hit on by obvious high school students well into my late 20s; i'm glad that seems to have stopped, at least.

it helps to be clever rather than blunt. but, really: just ask....

i've spent a lot of time in activist groups - on the ground, interacting and protesting, as well as debating online - and i've only met around three (don't hold me to that exact number) feminists that are as "radical" as you're suggesting, and one of them was a cis male. the literature is vast and largely troubling, but it's not taken particularly seriously by most people once they get out of the classroom. most self-identified feminists have the intelligence and critical thinking skills to deconstruct this the way you have.

in a sentence, you're stating that the biggest victim of patriarchy is men. you've just hit the tip of it. i've heard dozens of women state that at meetings, conferences, book clubs and other activist get togethers. it's directly in the mainstream of feminist thinking.

it's just a shame that the loudest voices are often the ones most listened to, considering that they're quite often completely fringe.

what people want is equality. that's intuitive. and we can see that it's possible - we've all interacted in specific settings where it exists.

there's really no reason to let this stack of logically dubious, and mostly empirically debunked, "theories" erase what you're able to construct with your own experiences. it will all end up in the trash heap, eventually...

actually, i think he's missed the boat on this. this was true in the 70s, nobody listened, and now we have a mess. moving forward, college degrees are the next thing to become useless, as industry after industry becomes integrated with advanced automation.

rather than bite and claw around ways to find new types of jobs, i think we need to come face-to-face with the so-called luddite fallacy and realize that the technology is getting to the post-marxist reality of superproduction, taking us off these so-called infinite growth curves. this is actually progress, in terms of maximizing individual human freedom. but it's going to require a paradigm shift in economics, which of course won't happen.

in the meantime, you're looking at an economy run by robots and endemic structural employment, driving political unrest that's going to lead to some hard choices. the teleology be damned, but i think the dude got it right.

nowadays, unless you have a passion for academia, you're really better off just trying to get in somewhere when you're 17 and focusing on climbing the ladder.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/cut-university-enrolment-by-30-expand-colleges-ceo-commissioned-report-urges-1.3014893

i just saw the animal i've been seeing traces of around here for the last few months, but i neither had my glasses nor a camera. it looked like a large black felid, which is confusing me in how i ought to react.

see, there aren't supposed to be large, black felids anywhere around here. it's established that there are cougars in the region, but melanistic cougars aren't supposed to exist; rather, a large, black felid would probably be a jaguar, and this is nowhere near it's historical range. the thing is, though, that people keep seeing them, all over the eastern side of the continent.

it was standing in a back alley, beside a garbage can, about 20 m away and just looking at me. my eyesight is not terrible, but it's not good enough to tell the difference between a large cat, a large dog and a coywolf at 20 m. i just backed away slowly, ensuring i didn't turn my back, like one is supposed to in such an encounter.

given the combination of evidence i have (including it's interest in the garbage can) it seems far more likely that it's a coywolf. if so, i'm not really worried. they sound scary, and everything, but they don't see us a prey source. in fact, they help in the pest control (rats, birds, and especially canada geese) that the city won't carry out anymore.

but i can't shake the fact that it *looked* like a cat. and if it is a cat, it's an obligate carnivore - unlike the coywolves. canids can eat fruit and whatever else is left out. cats need fresh meat, and if that's a cat, it's a big one.

again: the reality is that i have no convincing evidence. the idea of a jaguar hanging out in downtown windsor is patently absurd; if i were on the other side of the phone, i would laugh at anybody calling that in. but i remain concerned about the possible consequences (children being eaten) of ignoring this.

i need to make sure i have my phone on me when i go out...

i mean, if i was confident it was just passing through, then whatever. but it seems to be making a home here.

something i've been thinking about is whether this might be a good "safe place" for a species like this, specifically to raise cubs. big cats like this can move a good distance, and it's really not that far out to areas where there's large amounts of deer. an abandoned house in the city is probably a safer place to leave the cubs.

i know - they'd be detected by now. but they're pretty sneaky, actually.

wow, rt. i don't expect your media major anchors to have masters degrees in law, but this is painful to watch.

the division of powers is a jurisdictional issue, and it's crystal clear within constitutions. even the most corrupt judge can't really fuck these kinds of cases up. there's very little room for interpretation. in fact, it's surprising it even went to court - especially if the argument was some kind of incoherent "exception". no. no exceptions to division of powers...

this could turn itself on it's head, though. if the rule is that it's in the city's jurisdiction, that means that local law trumps state law, absolutely. which means that all the companies need to do is bribe their way into city council to get a specific ban overturned.

it actually renders cuomo's decision irrelevant.

it's also the reason why city council votes on decriminalizing marijuana are useless; the division of powers places this (criminal law) in state and ultimately federal jurisdiction, so the city has no control over it.

he more i look at the reaction to this, the more i think it will backfire.

"mike pence is a leader.
mike pence turned indiana into the new west virginia.
vote mike pence, 2016."

on the bright side, it should be good for west virginia.

this would have been assumed unconstitutional before the hobby lobby case last year. i know it looks like a local legislative issue, but it's really a federal judicial issue.

a lot of companies have come out against this as unworkable, including a lot of what's left of the manufacturing sector there. what they need to do is focus on changing the judicial precedent, by orchestrating a case that forces the court to deal with a contradiction they can't square. it should have to do with workplaces restricting christianity, somehow. that will force the court to reverse itself, which will allow a judicial challenge of this law.

that could take 20 years.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LH2FVxrj4k

my guess is that the second car was following the first, the driver got scared about getting lost and made a stupid choice as a consequence of it. the truck has too much inertia to stop that quickly.

you know who is likely to argue against intelligent extra-terrestrial life?

lizard people.

think about it.

i agree that intelligence seems to be lethal, here, on this planet. i even wrote a symphony about it in the late 90s.

but we really can't even talk about the chemistry of possible extra-terrestrial life, really. there's just far too many variables to be able to get a handle on this...

for example, look at the way that plants or mushrooms work, with these elaborate root structures. if a species like that evolved intelligence, it might be collective, and then the game changes. or, look at ants. smart ants would be a frightening proposition.

i want to argue the bigger issue is distance, but it's only meaningful relative to our short lives. maybe some other species has a lifespan of 10,000 years. then, these distances are manageable.

but i do think that, if there was anything close enough to contact, we'd already know about it. either there's nothing in this area of the universe or the information is being suppressed (i don't think that's so crazy....) or they were here before, and are avoiding us....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ccNt4Dzyfg

it seems like a lot of the people in the united states want a king, not a president.

he's kind of half making a valid point. it's one thing to point out that the lack of local activism is responsible for the lack of movement - and he's technically correct in doing so. it's another to look at the viability of local activism, combined with the broad intentions of the american public. it's not clear that americans ever wanted a republic. it's pretty clear at this point, however, that they don't, right now. maybe they will one day...

putting obama's soft right leanings aside, historians looking back are going to see a blown opportunity. he walked into this with a congressional majority, and sat on his hands until it disappeared. now, he complains he can't get anything through congress. oops.

a kid doesn't like tests.

shocking.

"i propose less tests and more recess."

i think she's half right, but she's got it backwards. people who have attended university have been through these courses where you take a final exam that's worth 60-75% of your grade. they're often multiple choice, and focus on irrelevant details. they're worded in tricky, confusing ways. as metrics, they're useless in determining anything other than whether the student can memorize large amounts of mostly useless information - information that can be googled in 20 seconds in the modern real world. many large employers also use similar tests for screening purposes.

like it or not, and criticize it's value, but it's what job applicants have to deal with in the real world.

walking into that reality, i wish i'd been prepped for it a bit more. i never took tests like that in high school and never really adjusted properly.

it's got to be one way or the other - either we need to prepare our kids better for what's going to happen when they get older, or we need to revamp everything. as it is, as long as the universities and employers continue to use these kinds of tests, it's important to get the kids ready. this idea of marching kids along naively and shrugging when they don't adjust to the things you never taught them is really shitty.

she denies that the results of the test are meaningful. whomever told her this is wrong. her ability to pass tests of this sort will have long term implications, when she starts writing them as a young adult.

the mirror-test as a metric for innate self-awareness seems to have some problems. these kids react exactly the same way an iguana would.

28-03-2015: screaming females - ripe (ferndale)

their music:
http://screamingfemales.com/

review:
http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/shows/2015/03/28.html

banging upstairs literally damaged light fixtures

hi.

i don't know what you're doing up there this morning, but i'm pretty sure i heard some wood snap and the light fixture in the other bedroom was literally knocked out of it's frame as the result of the banging. it sounds like a lot of heavy things have been dropped on to old wood that shouldn't have heavy things dropped on it.

i think i should be able to rescrew the fixture in. but the fixtures belong to you, and i'm supposed to inform you of issues involving them.

but i mean...this is pretty extreme. and the snap was loud; it seems like the joists in the room were damaged, so i'd advise coming down to see the damage - and maybe being a little more careful with these old, rotting floors. between the water damage and the crumbling plaster and everything else, the floors are really taking a lot of stress.

(pause)

i was able to fix the fixture, and there's nothing to see except some chunks of plaster - although it seems like there's a lot of loose chunks of something in the ceiling. like, when you adjust the fixture, you can feel it rolling around in large, loose chunks of something broken.

so, on second thought, i'm not sure there's anything to see.

but it really sounded awful. it wasn't the creak of an old floor. it was more like a stick snapping in a fire.

i mean, these are old floors. if you abuse them enough, they'll give way.

"not the first time i lost to a black guy"

this makes no sense as a joke, unless it means to say that blacks are inferior, and it's some kind of shameful thing - in which case it's self-deprecating. and flatly racist. he deserves some pushback for that, it's not acceptable....

in all seriousness

1) dogs have very sensitive noses. some of that stuff - like the taco - was pretty heavy. it's like getting kicked in the groin.
2) i'd be worried about the dog choking on a few of the smaller items. i've seen dogs that can barely eat out of a bowl without coughing.
3) your dog sucks. i've never had to teach a dog - especially not a golden - how to catch. it's innate.

 
regarding the carbs...

dogs are not obligate carnivores like most cats are. wild canids actually tend to eat a lot of fruit. you can pretty much follow the same rules as you'd follow for people - keep the refined sugars down.

rachele.ls
You took it too far, it's not that serious. It's food, not bricks so his nose is probably fine.

deathtokoalas
no, i think you're underestimating how sensitive the nose is. that taco would have really stung, if she didn't move out of the way.

if you've seen those videos of lava flows moving at a crawl towards villages and everybody just standing around shrugging, it does bring up the question of trying to do something to stop it. of course, the problem is that just about anything you could think of putting in the way is just going to melt, so it seems pointless. and you'd imagine that the amount of ice necessary to even slow it down a little is going to create flooding issues as bad as the lava flow (once the bulk of it transfers to the atmosphere).

i guess this is maybe useful as something exploratory, to get a better understanding of it. but i wouldn't count on seeing helicopters dropping piles of ice on moving lava flows any time soon...

he's logically correct, but it's pulling a negative proof trick. it's not a fallacy, it's more of a refuge. it's like a theist pointing out that you can't disprove the existence of god. fair enough, but it doesn't really help. there really isn't any way to disprove free will, either. but i think the balance of evidence leads to a skeptical position.

i mean, it's pretty convincing, this idea that we're in control. and it may seem trivial to suggest that we're bound to trivial debates. but, it's not really an argument.

every human out there has their intellectual crutches. there's really good reasons why chomsky, as an individual, is going to fight against the rejection of free will. but he's really just twisting the question around.

dj cavi
+deathtokoalas free will does not need to be disproved. it is a meaningless term. our will directs our decisions. man that is not in a prison is free... from being in prison, and that is it

deathtokoalas 
+dj cavi  i think you're misunderstanding the concept of free will - it refers to whether we're in control of our decisions. you claim our will directs our decisions. but, that's exactly the question to be pondered - does it really, or are we in some way controlled by outside forces? not market forces, or biological forces. that's more the question of a hobson's choice. but a hobson's choice is only a false choice in the sense that taking the other option leads to negative consequences. in that sense we're not and probably never can be truly free. but we can always choose (or seem to choose) to starve ourselves, or get beaten or be homeless or whatever other thing comes from not taking the "only" choice. i mean, i don't want to come off as a randian or something, but if you're approaching the issue strictly logically, you can't just ignore this. we are seemingly free to do stupid things that will harm us in the short or long term.

that's not really getting at the issue of free will, though. that asks a question more subtle: if we seem to choose to starve or be beaten or be homeless, did we really make that decision?

personally, i'm somewhat of a verificationist. and, in that sense i do agree that the question is rather meaningless. but, i'd take a position of agnosticism on issues of the sort. i think that's the correctly rational perspective: the evidence may lean towards skepticism, but i'm not about to take a hard position either way. i couldn't imagine a theory on free will that could be falsifiable.

but, the "nice story" i like is sort of leaning towards a fatalist conception of the universe. this huge explosion happened some time in the distant past, and the entire universe is a complicated consequence of it - inalterable, and entirely determined. that actually abolishes free will. you choose to starve because of the big bang. modern physics would argue "but there's so many random things!". well, that's not entirely clear. we know there are some things we don't seem to be able to alter. that's as easily an argument for fatalism as it is for chaos - we lack the ability to affect outcomes, and have no concept of how we conceivably might, meaning, as far as we can tell, there's only one way it can conceivably happen. and, we simply can't argue we have "controlled conditions" when we don't understand the factors that could possibly alter the outcome, so the basis of the argument for "different outcomes from controlled experiments" collapses on the point of the experiment possibly not being controlled.

but, that's not falsifiable and is likely never going to be.

Wizardry
Time is modeled as a line. A line is formed of ∞ points. Points are zero-dimensional; i.e., they do not have volume, area, length, or any other higher-dimensional analogue. Is the line, used to represent time, so different from time itself? Or may the line represent time more accurately than you are presently aware? Only time will tell. Welcome to the Mysterium Tremendum. Please excuse the self-possessed numinosity and have a wonderful new day, my Shpongled friends!

ImprovisedSurvival
Not so sure. Even a period on a paper has a third dimension. From a far enough distance, the Earth will appear as a single point/ zero dimensional, as do the stars in space, or the cells in your body, or the galaxy above, or the grain of sand below, or the atom inside, or the solar system outside, the nucleus, the electron, the photon... universe.  

All is perspective

Wizardry
The period on a paper though, is not the same as a point as defined by Euclidean geometry:  "The description of a point, 'that which has no part,' indicates that Euclid will be treating a point as having no width, length, or breadth, but as an indivisible location."

That being said, I think you may have been making reference to the fractal nature of the universe (As above, so below) in which case I partially agree with your sentiment.

ImprovisedSurvival
Euclid is dead, the only thing that has no width, length and breadth is the space in between the lights

enleuk
A line is not made of points if a line has length but a point does not. Instead it becomes a line as soon as it is something more than a mere point, as soon as it has a length, however minuscule, i.e. even an infinitesimal line is a line and not a point as long as it retains any length at all. In other words, a line is not a row of non-dimensional dots, but a distance between two non-dimensional positions. In reality, there are neither straight lines nor points.

Time is motion, motion is a change in any direction, we can call this direction length. It's not a straight line though. If we assume that the Big Bang was the start of time, at least the start of motion in our universe, our bubble, regardless if other bubbles exist, then obviously time and motion is rather chaotic, spreading outwards from the centre and also clumping together and moving in fairly unpredictable directions at any given local point.

Wizardry
Theoretical science seems to have a way with creating something from nothing for no reason.  Lines arise from nothings in big fancy bangs and bring forth talking monkeys after aeons of "chaos."  I guess that's not as far fetched as an omnipotent creator designing a world intentionally...or is it?  I guess the big explosion at the start with all the chaos makes it more edgy and entertaining for the youth.

enleuk
Excuse me for explaining the errors of your description of Euclidian geometry, I'll never do it again.

deathtokoalas
euclidean geometry is either incomplete or inconsistent. i think that hilbert's approach of undefined terms is preferable. what is a point? what is a line? we can't express these things in language, but we know them when we see them.

that said, it's not really all that bad to think of an infinite number of points in a line segment. any continuous subset of the real line is uncountable.

time is often modeled as a line, but you're oversimplifying it. if you'd like to understand how time and space are connected, i would suggest investing some time into the theory of relativity. which, fwiw, requires very non-euclidean geometry.

yeah. i think he's a cia agent, basically.

i think it's actually occam's razor. the idea that he's really that brainwashed and self-righteous is hard to believe. and he really doesn't seem to be trolling.

it's just a step beyond apologism. it's active support. i know he denies it, but it's purely cognitive dissonance. he's gotta be working this...

give him another 5-10 years, and he'll miraculously "see the light" and starting writing books about "spirituality". that's the end game: hook then co-opt. wait for it....

you know, i'm always skeptical about these kinds of things. it's like.....nice speech, johnny, but then why don't you ratify the rome convention? the rules exist. they've been worked out. but your country won't adopt them. you can stand around and talk all you want, but you won't sign the critical documents. but, bringing angelina jolie in is simply good politics, if you're trying to shore up the vagina vote.

there's some code words in this speech that have made me look at it a little differently, though. population control code words. eugenics code words.

i mean, the bottom line is that we can't have a reasonable discussion about this, so it's just kept out of public debate. we're going to start calling each other nazis and stuff. that doesn't mean there aren't valid policy objectives underlying family planning or abortion planning. i mean, we breed like rodents. we've been lucky that the technology has continually put malthus off to the next decade. but that carrying capacity is an unavoidable, finite limit. it's an eventual inevitability.

let's be clear: rape continues as a military tactic because it is successful in asserting dominance over conquered populations. it's the most successful intimidation tactic out there. the american army used it in iraq. so long as it continues to be effective, it's going to be continued to be used, by militias and major armies, alike.

but, let's consider the ramifications of mass rape in a society with little to no access to contraception, and essentially no access to abortion. these are children born to displaced mothers into violent circumstances. they have little future but to become a "security concern", as angelina put it.

i remain skeptical that this is really possible, except on paper. it's too powerful a tactic. and i'd again point to those unratified statutes. but what's driving this is not what's apparent, and it may be wielding a higher level of influence than is obvious.

in order to maintain a healthy species, women need to be able to make free and uncoerced decisions about who they allow to impregnate them. i'm not sure this history has been written. and, if it were, it would likely be rejected as racist. but, take a look at the areas of the world that were mass raped by the mongol armies for centuries and think it through.

but, how do you convince your boss to pay you in bitcoins, when he works for the bank?

i remain skeptical about this stuff. but, it might make some sense on the other side of automation, which is the actual revolution we're on the brink of.

retail is now the largest part of the economy, and it's on the brink of being replaced by robots. when that happens, we're looking at a highly productive and almost jobless economy.

where bitcoin makes some sense, in this context, is as a rationing tool to ensure roughly equal access to goods.

but, if you're putting your faith in the future of a currency, you're really just daydreaming as the car heads towards the cliff. the trends are pointing to a distributive system where currency, as a medium of exchange, is largely obsolete.

neither are really wrong. but you need to back 'er up a bit.

crt is a subset of a broader critical legal theory. the idea of critical legal theory is that the law is just a tool to push through political opinions, so all this idea of reasonable people and objective rational logic is just a lot of bullshit - smoke and mirrors to cover the state's application of it's ideological aims. it applies to all kinds of things. crt is a racial application of the broader theory to the remnants of apartheid in the american south.

the way i'd explain it quickly in a youtube comment is just that the official approach to legal theory has it backwards. the basis of our legal system is that the judge is supposed to look at the evidence and draw a rational, logical conclusion of how the law applies to it, in a way that is consistent with existing legal precedents. what the critical theorists says is that this is, in practice, almost always just a utopian abstraction. what judges actually do is form an opinion, then go looking for a precedent that backs up the opinion. there are so many legal cases to draw upon that this is more or less a worthless formality, especially at the higher levels. the court system consequently reduces to a person in a robe enforcing a subjective and personal opinion, not an objective system of impartial justice. justice is not blind, but merely the personal opinion of the judge.

i wouldn't consider this to be radical. it's pretty apparent, actually, if you take a look through some case law. and the applications are very, very wide.

now, a lot of things are going to affect those personal opinions. crt is just the idea that racism is going to be one of them, if the society is rooted in racist institutions. and, through large swaths of the southern united states, this is pretty apparently true.

now, soledad is right in pointing out that you're going to read this at any school. not just harvard. it's in the spectrum. it can't be ignored. teaching it doesn't imply any partiality towards it. it's just barack doing his job.

but, suggesting that it has nothing to do with white supremacy is disingenuous. it is the basic premise. but, it's not particularly radical to acknowledge that it's an accurate premise - so long as you're careful about your application of it.

i noticed a little while back that something in commercially available white flour was messing with my intestines something nasty. i switched to whole wheat and the problem completely resolved itself. now, here's the thing - white flour really is a pretty horrific thing to consume, when you look at what you're eating. it's consequently not that whack to think people are really noticing a difference when they switch their bread, even if the gluten issue, itself, is being over self-diagnosed something ridiculously.

yeah. the logic here is entirely backwards. it's precisely because the minimum wage jobs (retail, services) are immoveable that the government has a lot of flexibility to dictate minimum wages without affecting the economy. you can't pick the store up and move it, so you can poke the companies in the eye and fling rotten food at them and do whatever else you want with no consequence. the government has the leverage here, not the private sector.

in theory, you can pick the assembly line up and move it. but, they're already gone, anyways. assembly line jobs tend to be unionized, which puts most of them well above minimum wage to begin with.

the argument is really over the sanctity of the market. liberal market advocates will jump through all sorts of absurd hoops to try and convince you that it is "logical" to not interfere. but, virtually every one of their arguments is deconstructed quite easily. don't let them fool you...

regardless, what's happening with these increases is that they're moving with inflation. this consequently is NOT an increase in the real minimum wage, it's just a fair adjustment to reverse what would have otherwise been a loss due to inflation. it's an excellent policy that we're lucky to have here. it means we'll never lose income due to inflation.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-raises-minimum-wage-to-11-25-1.3001278

any tension relief from refraining from coffee is being reversed by struggling to stay awake more than 12 hours. i felt alert around noon, but now i'm a walking zombie. i'm going to let it sit for tonight nonetheless, and likely hit it pretty hard tomorrow.

now that the weather's cleared up, i want to get out to some more shows. part of the point of this was to force myself to hang out in the art spaces of detroit to meet people (which i'm very bad at), but it really seems to be a lot of terrible. i'm going to get out to see some rock shows, though: torche, screaming females, lightning bolt, loma prieta, la dispute...

one thing that became a little clearer as the tension came down a bit was that a part of what's happening is related to the bones. i think there's some chips in there, although it's hard to get to cause and effect. the earliest i remember this happening was after i got a tetanus shot after i smashed my face in when i fell of a bike, in 2005. i'm not pinning anything on the tetanus shot, but it seems that the bones never really healed properly. i don't know if all the tics are chipping it, or if the chips are causing the tic..

i'm glad that the blu-ray install was painless. the plug & play picked it up (never clear with this version of xp that i've hacked into pieces. i can't get it to read my sansa mp3 player consistently, for example. but it seems to be good with drives.), and imgburn knows what to do with a big iso. so, i didn't even have to install any new software. it's kind of like it just worked. how about that. must be a talented tech that set it up that way.

i'm trying to get rid of an expired bottle of peanut butter, but am going to crash shortly. it seemed promising this afternoon. it really did. but it's been a long time since i've been off coffee...

one more day for recovery/detox. i'm going to try to hit torche on friday.....

i literally slept all due tuesday (my legs were too sore for much of anything), and spent most of yesterday immobile but got my eating playlist padded for another few months. that's actually a time consuming process, the way the feeds are designed. it would be nice if you could jump to a specific point in the feed. alas...

my legs are back, at least.

i'm going to spend the next several hours getting information off my politics page. i'll likely only take a dent out of it, but this is a good time for it. i'm basically sick.

as for the effect? well, i'm feeling my perception of time slow down a little. a bit of tension has removed itself from my head and neck, but it still lingers - i think it's still releasing. and i'm more hydrated, which is an all around positive regarding skin and everything else. but the facial ticks have merely slowed down.

i'm sticking with the water. no doubt. but i think i've convinced myself the coffee is not the problem. and i'll consequently likely get back on it and back to work next week. i need a few more days though, to let the tension really wind down....

grandePaoloDiCanio
Living in Korea, I can tell you only 1% of women are naturally pretty, the rest is either average or did plastic surgery. About 40% of women over 18 did plastic surgery, especially eyes, nose and even jaws ... so repealing imo ....

deathtokoalas
actually, i believe this is accurate. there's a stigma in eastern asia right now regarding epicanthal folds, especially. facial surgery to "westernize" appearance is a near necessity for career advancement in a society dominated by a strange kind of inverted european supremacy and accompanying inferiority complex.

statistics regarding breast augmentation in certain parts of the united states are equally as alarming.

xxx
+deathtokoalas part right but part wrong. it's true that many koreans think western(caucasian) people are good looking but it's only about shape. not else. when humans are sexually attracted to opposite sex humans, it's not only about shape. the physical attraction of human appearance is about 4 senses. sight, touch, sound, smell. so the physical attraction is the shape, eyeballs, skin, body smell, voice. it's true than many koreans are attracted to caucasians' shape. but not their skin, not their eyeballs, not their voice, not their smell.

this beauty thing is totally subjective thing. it's not objective thing at all. most koreans prefer korean food than western food. not because korean food is better. it's just because of subjective preference. i'm a korean guy and most koreans guys i know prefer asian porn than caucasian porn. i'm not trying to be rude. i'm simply saying the reality. sorry for my bad english.

deathtokoalas
+xxx my understanding is that the drive behind the plastic surgery is not a desire to maximize sexual attraction but career ambition. it's apparently hard for a female to get a job in large parts of east asia without conforming to a westernized, hypersexualized norm.

oguns iron
+deathtokoalas not sure this is about white supremacy. If it's about typically european features, why aren't they all trying to have huge noses ? why aren't they all wearing clear contacts ? Round eyes exist among east-asians. They're just not that common.

I think people often misinterpret beauty trends in peoples from outside the european world. People will often say that the preference for light skinned women in africa is due to a desire for european looks. Is it ? Then why aren't african men clamoring for european style butts too ? lol

deathtokoalas
+oguns iron the answer is that they only know "white" through what's been sold to them. much as we only know "asian" through what's been sold to us. whites are presented to them in media as these perfect, aryan superpeople. a master race. and, it comes out rather starkly in the media they create for themselves, which consistently pushes this almost nazi mythology.

but, i mean, i don't think it's conscious white dominance. it's more of an inferiority issue than a dominance issue (although where there is one, there is the other). most westerners simply don't know that south korea spent decades after the armistice (1953) as an authoritarian american-controlled military dictatorship. this video itself glosses over that. south korea really wasn't organized very differently than north korea, it just had the typical western-backed nationalist/fascist dictator in place - like in egypt, or taiwan, or, previously, iraq. there was no freedom of expression in south korea between 1953 and 1988. as an occupying power, the united states did what occupying powers do, which was often (and sometimes still is) rather brutal. as the culture reconstructed itself after the lingering destruction of world war two into the korean war, it did so in an atmosphere where whites were everywhere dominant - in media, on the street, in the economy, etc. and, when you combine that reality with an inherently hierarchical culture, you get this weird inferiority complex.

i'm not making this stuff up, it's out there in print.

oguns iron
what i notice often around the world is that peoples will often want to imitate characteristics of other people who are closely related, but whose appearance is considered ideal. It doesnt always have to do with dominance, btw. The romans considered the germans savages but they did like the looks of their women. The indians have always praised white skin very very much, but you don't see them praising blond hair and blue eyes. If Indian beauty standards were all about trying to look at British as possible, they would be all about blond hair and other nordic looks but they aren't. Instead, north-ndian beauty standards are basically Iranian standards and north-india can be argue to belong to the wider persian civilization in significant ways.

A lot of very poorly educated people want to reduce everything to european influence. Yes it certainly had some influence but non-europeans weren't blank slates before a few centuries ago.

deathtokoalas
+oguns iron i don't think that you're understanding what white supremacy is. white supremacy is not about skin tone, it's about culture. speaking of white supremacy in east asia is consequently not a question of being victims of history, or denying agency. what we see in east asia is east asians going out of their way to participate in what they see as a superior culture. they want to join the master race, to discard what they've been taught to see as an inferior culture and become the superior, dominant one. it's more like a successful colonizing process.

Philip
only 1% of women are natural beauty? do not exaggerate or lie stupid. do you think any country or group like that exists in the world? i'll say more than 80% of women in Korea are 100% natural. Of course Korea has high rate of plastic surgery rate but most of them are actually not 'plastic' surgery because most of the surgery are just making double eyelids. very simple surgery. it is still true that there are relatively bit more women who get real 'plastic' surgery compared to United States or Japan, because of relatively cheap price but high level of medical&surgery skills.

deathtokoalas
the statistics (including the removal of epicanthal folds) are indeed somewhere around 40%, which is quite a bit higher than the still alarming statistics for breast augmentation in the united states (which is the proper comparison, taking cross-cultural concerns into consideration).

(deleted response)

deathtokoalas
+Hwan Hong Lee listen, i don't have any nationalistic sympathies, here. i'm a canadian of mixed caucasian and native american descent. i'm just stating the facts. and the numbers really are that high, if you'd care to look into it.

[the 1% part is a little more contentious]

imnotgaybut20is20
where did u pull thoses stats? from ur ass?

deathtokoalas
+imnotgaybut20is20 it's easily googleable. you'll get various numbers (1 in 5, 1 in 3, half), but 40% is in the range of published estimates.

(deleted response) 

deathtokoalas
+Cassey Belle my understanding is that it's pretty openly discussed in korea, actually. there's no shame attached to it at all. it's just a tool to use for social advancement. if anything, there may be a stigma attached to not having surgery, kind of like there's a stigma attached to being overweight. "too lazy to get surgery", "too poor to afford surgery", etc.....

you have to remember this is east asia, which is really on the bleeding edge of everything cybernetic and transhumanist. the stigmas against technology that we have here, that ultimately greek cult of natural beauty, is foreign to their culture, which is going to be in favour of anything that will give you a competitive advantage to get ahead. there's no concept of individual creation in god's image, either. it's a more collectivist society, rooted in deeper concepts of conformity. beauty is less in the eye of the beholder, and more defined by adherence to culturally enforced norms.

but, we're in an open economy now.

it's not that i'm debating the multiplier effect. that idea worked nicely when we were all in closed economies with these nice, hefty tariffs protecting us from the outside. but, that world is not with us anymore.

the construction worker might or might not buy a car, but let's look at more pressing targets of income. first, the construction worker is probably in a lot of debt. credit card debt. student loan debt. mortgage debt. before any new cars are purchased, all that debt needs to be addressed. and, then where does the construction worker go to spend what's left over?

the assumption justifying deficit-spending was that the money would go into local companies, which would invest in local manufacturing, which would create local jobs. the chain of logic is as valid as it's ever been. but, if the construction worker buys goods at walmart (likely, lowest cost) then the investment goes overseas and creates jobs in asia. it pulls the rug out from under the policy.

if we're smart reasonable people, we realize that jobs are created through increases in aggregate demand. but, when you apply that to the service sector it translates merely to urban sprawl. increased sales at walmart don't create jobs, they just make the workforce work harder.

it's in some senses an irrelevant concern in terms of half of the policy. somebody has to fix the infrastructure, and that somebody is invariably going to be the federal government. but, the reality is that free trade abolished keynesian deficit-spending as a coherent economic idea. the effects will multiply out into the global economy, sure. but, the only way that the government can create jobs is directly. deficit-spending just can't create jobs in a system of global free trade and offshored manufacturing.

this debate over whether the government ought to influence the economy is anachronistic. today, the government is unable to influence the economy. and that requires some serious adjustment on the pseudo-left.

in a world of absurdity and debt slavery, suicide is often the only rational option. it's just a question of coming to terms with it. the lucky ones are those that can put it off the longest, but in the end we're left with the rational choice of suicide or giving up and giving way to the delusional nature of the existence we inhabit.

but, we can't be allowed to understand this - not all of us, not all at the same time. the entire society would collapse. so, we're force fed these elaborate systems to trick us into meaning. we're taught to alienate the bright few that get the meaninglessness and hopelessness inherent in our economy. this appears to be ideological enforcement.

life has meaning, kids. only crazy people think otherwise. now put on your uniform and get to fucking work.

here's the thing: if we all understood this at the same time, if we let the whole thing collapse, we might actually emancipate our minds to the point where we could build a world worth living in.

but, see, that's why i'm crazy.

of course.

it's a good idea gone wrong.

first of all, i'm going to state the obvious, which is eluding people: if the union movement was succeeding, this couldn't happen. it's a reflection of the failure of unions as a tactic. but this has been gone over repeatedly: it's the hierarchical nature of the union. the reduction of union to management. it defeats the point. now, workers are paying two management classes instead of one, and getting screwed over nearly as badly.

what they're describing here is a type of parasitism. it's ambulance chasing. they bargain the wages up 50%, then take half the increase. that's as capitalistic and thieving as any other management class. after a few years of inflation, they really are just stealing money from workers, and ought to be thrown off like any other management class.

unions need to be run by workers, or they're inevitably just reduced to co-opted shadow management pushing for the status quo. hopefully, this ruling will help light a fire under workers and resurrect the diy attitude they need to fight to abolish management altogether.

i think it's rather naive to think that the majority of american pop music isn't government propaganda.

the truth is that it's been that way for as long as there's been pop music. everybody goes servin'. servin' usa....

this is a good example of russian propaganda, which appears to be more about stirring the pot than pushing any kind of organized revolt.

jfk was, of course, the head spokesperson for the pro-militarist eastern banking elite. it's the idea that he was anything less than a war criminal that is historical revisionism.

there's nothing particularly inconsistent about a group like this taking the initiative in defining his legacy. in fact, it's fairly fitting.

it's a nice day, taking advantage of it. got some compost dropped off this morning...

the city doesn't accept compost, and i hate throwing it out. what a waste of nutrients. so, i leave it in the freezer until it builds up (it's just fruit cores, egg shells and coffee grinds, split into those three components) and drop it off at this local muslim community group that uses it to grow tomatoes to give to homeless people. that's a useful recycling of material. but fucking capitalism, right? i mean, i'd rather see the city do something like this than a religious group, but it doesn't. you work with what's available.

it means a lengthy walk with a knapsack full of decomposing organic matter every few months, but it's worth it. it's actually good exercise, and gets me some vitamin d.

i picked up a brita on the way back, as well as a drill set for the shelves i want to build. i was expecting drill sets to be like $150 and that i'd have to improvise to get the shelves in. but it turns out that there are much cheaper options. the drill was $30, and the bits were $10. it's bare bones, but i would have spent that much for a falling apart "fancy" drill at a pawn shop. what i need is stability, not power. just shelves...

the brita is important for the neck experiments i'm doing. i needed coffee for the walk. but i may just be dehydrated. i know - i'm grasping. but, i don't drink *any* water, and i've noticed that increasing my water intake has had positive impacts in the past. i mean, i drink tons of coffee, tons of juice, tons of soy....but no water. the reason is that i'm perpetually iffy about the water out of the tap. so, when i get that set up i expect to notice a positive difference one way or the other. at the least, i can say i've controlled for it when i get to the doctors.

as it's so nice out, i'm going to get a few other things done today. i've got a blu-ray burner waiting for me at the best buy, which i'll need to bus to. i've been waiting for them to come down under $100. this one is $99.99, so, hey. that's my grandmother's christmas present for me, i guess. the track i'm currently working on would require 4 dvds to back up, and that's going to be the norm moving forward into the trivial group material and beyond, so it's time to move to blu-ray for back up.

i'm also going to stop at long & mcquade with my fake strat and see what they're going to charge to resolder it. i took a closer look at it, and it seems like the previous owner mangled the insides up altogether. the switches are not stock. i can follow a diagram and get the logic down and stuff, but i don't want to fuck around with something that's already been fucked with. i only need to fuck up once to fry myself. i doubt many guitarists really realize the kind of current they're dealing with it. playing the electric guitar is actually pretty dangerous. there's some spots in the track i'm working on that would benefit from the skinnier pickups, which was the point in picking up the fake strat. so, it's time to get that fixed...

so, lots of exciting things for the day, for me. even if the rest of the week ends up spent as a zombie...

see, i don't see anything particularly infeasible about early civilizations being flooded, but it's not necessary to go as far back as the ice age to get a flood scenario. the neolithic revolution, itself, would have lead to circumstances similar to what we're seeing today as "global warming". you just need to take your timeline forward a few thousand years to make it consistent with everything else. then, you'd have early neolithic sites being drowned as a consequence of the neolithic revolution itself.

the thing is that it's going to be difficult to separate the anthropogenic aspect from the natural one because they would have happened in quick sequence. but note that oceans continued to rise until ~6000 bce - well after the technical end of the last ice age. if you take it up to that point, it's no longer an outlandish date for early advanced settlements.

of course, the creepy thing about this is that all your data is centralized on google's servers, for surveillance and algorithmic analysis to create "personalized advertisements". it's total spyware. that is why google is making these things. apple seems to be moving to a similar data collection model, with it's new portless devices. the goal here is to push personal storage to obsolescence, and make cloud storage the default.

it's a win-win for the intelligence-industrial complex. who needs warrants in a driveless future, where everything is stored in the cloud with not-so-secret backdoors? and, imagine the possibilities of forced ad consumption when google controls your actual internet access.

"error. you have not watched the ad. please watch the ad and then continue."

actually, we need an orwellian term for ad.

"informational video". yeah...

"error. you have not watched the informational video. please watch the informational video and then continue."

it's remarkable how many people think the issue here is technology, as though people treated each other more respectfully before computers were widespread. the reality is that people have always spoken to and about each other like this. it's not "human nature", it's a function of social interaction. a corollary of existing in advanced societies.

so, yes, bullying can have some positive social aspects. some of those kids need to lose weight. i'd rather talk about the growing obesity epidemic. the peer pressure is an effective means of coercing kids that are raised poorly into better diet and exercise routines. obviously, gym class isn't working. in canada, especially, health is a public concern. i have no problem with this. in fact, i think it should be encouraged.

we can't be drawing equivalences between that kind of positive peer pressure and ignorant, racist stupidity. being fat is not the same thing as being black. accepting unhealthy lifestyles as "normal" is not the same thing as abolishing racism.

at the end of the day, people need to react. they can choose to ignore it and find a way to escape it, they can submit and change themselves or they can find something in between. but, this nonsense idea of total acceptance of everybody regardless of anything is neither realistic nor desirable.

the literature refers to peer pressure as an "informal social control". it's the kind of thing that requires development and fine-tuning in order to make the abolition of the state a feasible goal. and, so it's no coincidence that you get liberals and statists pushing the point of abolishing peer pressure so strongly - it cements their own place in society. it enforces the idea that we can't police ourselves, that we need a government to do it for us.

abolishing peer pressure would cut the bottom out of society. it's increasing atomization. right in line with the neo-liberal drive towards the cult of the self.

go ahead, eat yourself to a quick death. consume eight times as much food as you need. bog down health care resources. fuck your neighbours! and fuck anybody that wants to hold you to account for it!

you're an isolated individual with no connection to the world around you. it's your personal choice.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2f_kavukuKI

i couldn't live without the ports. i need a mouse, to begin with, and i tend to quarantine my different data types by drive. so, i've got an external drive for mp3s, a usb key for web design, etc. and i'm paranoid about wireless technology. everything in my house is wired. my desktop was built to not have wireless (i paid extra for a board without an integrated chip), i've got it disabled in the bios on my laptop and i actually physically damaged the receiver in my router...

so, i would find this useless.

but, in the end, might they actually be right, regarding the general market? do most people really want more than a glorified netbook?

i don't really know why people think this idea of a "slim laptop" is in any way meaningful in the first place. this ideal is just taken for granted. nobody explains the reasoning underlying it. it's suggested that having less ports is a valid trade-off for a slimmer size [and i don't think this is true - if you make the thing thick enough for one port, it's already thick enough for three], but i see no reason why a slimmer size has any value. i'll take a fat laptop with higher functionality, please.

but, again...i'm not the market. if the market wants a device to stream shit over netflix and access data from the cloud, the peripherals are increasingly useless.

Adam Shay
The reason why sheep's fall for it is because of the marketing strategy look at the introduction video they spend millions on it if they could at least spend that much on the hardware (I would personally pay any price they mention for it)

Zac Spurgeon
Although if the market wants a device to stream shit over Netflix and access data from the cloud, I still think that it's unethical to charge them for a fully-featured machine when they're basically getting a mid-level tablet with a keyboard.

deathtokoalas
dude thinks corporations care about what's ethical. ahahahahaha. do you realize who makes these things?

Zac Spurgeon
I didn't say they care about what's ethical, but normally they keep their unethical practices behind closed sweatshop doors, instead of just being blatantly dishonest to their consumer base.

deathtokoalas
i don't find apple tends to go out of it's way much, really. they just gloss over it with slick advertising. i mean, their operating system is just a tweaked bsd, which is open-source software. a lot of people put a lot of work into that, and didn't get a cut out of it when apple privatized it. everything they've done has been overpriced forever. it at least made some sense when they were selling power pcs, but since they switched to intel they're literally selling dells with freeware for three times the price. so, this is absolutely consistent with everything they've been doing for years.

Zac Spurgeon
True, but I think this is also the worst they've gotten so far. Whenever I've looked it up, you're paying a little less than twice as much for the same specs on a machine that's more difficult to service and overheats more easily. This is just a whole other level of ripoff. To be clear I'm not shocked or surprised, just increasingly annoyed.

Philip Kwok
Most people can't live without it. I can see people who buy this new MacBook and find no problem of is are those who don't really use computer more than a few hours a day, only surf webs, email, youtube and such. For anyone who even want to do lite office things will not even consider this piece of expensive paper weight. Yea. 1 to 2mm thinner and I don't have a USB port.... sorry, I don't really mind that extra 100g or 1 mm. I rather get 2 USB ports. Do they really think that matters more than versatility? Yes, people want thinner laptop but nobody told them they want to trade off usb ports and other ports for the extra 1 to 2 mm reduction. Who cares about that 1 to 2mm seriously?

so, i quit smoking for most of february and noticed the dysphagia improved but didn't disappear. i also noticed i was less alert and less productive. as the smoking does not seem to be the cause of the dysphagia, and i wanted to increase my alertness and productivity, i picked smoking back up for the first week of march. while my alertness and productivity did increase, the dysphagia quickly became unbearable. i'm at a breaking point and will stop. i need to eat. but it means i need to deal with the effects of withdrawal this week, which is extreme sleepiness. again. grargh.

i have enough evidence at this point to conclude that i either have ms or cancer. i'm going to have to go to the clinic and have this sorted out, as i know the dysphagia is not going to go away by not smoking. i just want to finish this song first...

there's really only one "easy way out", and it's that i have a massive ear infection. but, i'm grasping at straws.

my perspective about ms is that i can't do anything about it, so why waste the time in a doctor's office? but, it's starting to affect my arm, which affects my playing. if i can get some drugs for that, i'll take them.

cougars in downtown windsor

hi...

i saw your name in a newspaper report on cougar sightings in the region.

here's the thing: i don't have enough evidence to bring this to a police department or animal control or something. but, the mere premise of a cougar setting up in the middle of a city would be remarkable from a behavioural perspective. and, it's obviously of safety concerns, nonetheless.

i've been seeing various signs for months. large tracks through the snow (i didn't take pictures), glimpses out of the side of my eye, apparent movement in bushes, etc. it's easy to write these things off as mind tricks. and i do in fact have a history of mental illness.

but, i think i may have spotted some cubs this morning around marion street, just south of wyandotte. certainly, i've never heard a house cat make the "raaaaawr" sound i heard out of a small cat that reacted as soon as it saw me. feral cats don't generally react to people at all, in my experience. to get "raaaaawr"-ed at like that by a small cat was something i've never experienced before.

now, i didn't stick around to get a good look - i know i don't want to get between a cougar and it's cubs. and i wasn't wearing my glasses. but (from a distance, with weak vision) they looked like small, muscular, cream coloured house cats. maybe they were just that. but it's the behaviour that was unnerving to me, combined with other weak evidence.

cubs in the city? i know it's remarkable, but we know coyotes are doing this. and i know there's been an increase in sightings in the region lately.

however, i haven't seen a decrease in feral cats in the region lately. that's really what i've been looking for before i decided to make a call to an enforcement agency.

it's one thing to think you thought you saw a mountain lion. it's another to think you thought you see mountain lion cubs. i can't bring this to animal control, but i'd never forgive myself if i sat on this, wrote it off as mind tricks and then learned some kid down the street got taken. so, i think bringing it to the attention of somebody that can make a better scientific assessment is the best idea....

jessica

just actually watched this...

with the increase in tensions between russia and america, it's natural to want to turn to cold war experts for guidance. but, this is an error. there's two ways to look at why it's an error, but they break down to the same basic misunderstanding of western goals.

either the rise of neo-conservatism has changed american attitudes to one of aggressive domination, or the idea of building "trust" was never more than a trojan horse in the first place.

either way, what's clear is that this rhetoric is lost in the past. it has no lingering relevance. america is out to destroy, and russia has naively refused to accept it.

why has the united nations failed? because america does not want peace.

russia can submit or react.

mutual understanding is not on the table.

anonymous continues to demonstrate that it's a mouthpiece for the radical right, and quite plausibly shadow government propaganda.

what i'm getting from this video is that the establishment sees kanye as an uppity black man that needs to be taken down a notch.

kanye may not be the sharpest pencil in the box, and he may have some undiagnosed psychological issues, but there's generally a set of valid points underneath what is often his over the top rhetoric. the reason he's being targeted has to do with the attention he's drawing to those underlying points. they're topics that aren't supposed to be talked about openly, or expressed to a large audience.

expect the number of serial killers to skyrocket over the next twenty years.

and people snicker when i suggest gaming is phallic...

heads up on a flood starting next week.

i want to finish this track, first. but, soon, i'm going to be hitting my youtube feed back to july, 2014. it's finally run out for the first half of '14. the aim will be to put the longer videos in the watch later list, and watch the shorter ones. i've just not kept up to date since then.

this should take about a week. you can imagine there'll be lots of comments, many months out of date. get out now if you need to...

that was actually a perfect shot. can't fault federer. beat cleanly.

so, as we can see, lake huron is a pristine piece of untouched natural beauty. you could probably drink the water. look how clear it is!

meanwhile, in sudbury....

i've been thinking about what the doctor told me the last time i was in, though, and i think it's both correct and sort of reflective of the reality of the situation, which is that a psychological disability is really defined by whether you decide to have one or not. it's kind of justifying my tactics, actually. i'm not talking about physical limiting factors or something like down's syndrome, i'm talking about depression or personality disorders...

it's been remarked more than once that the society we live in is a psychopathic society, defined by antisocial social relations. you really can't get ahead unless you *do* have a personality disorder.

but what he told me was that it's pretty rare to see a psychiatrist for more than a few minutes, and most of them provide instant diagnosis. which produced ridicule from me. if you know me, you can imagine my response. are they magicians? medicine men? healers? what the fuck?

here's a good example of this. i'm looking through the review i picked up last week. it indicated i wasn't experiencing a loss of appetite, which implicitly suggested that i'm not all that depressed. but, that's such a hokey analysis. i'm actually the kind of person that assigns a lot of value to being thin (i don't tend to judge others by their weight, but it's important to me that i don't gain weight) and is fairly careful about how much i eat in order to ensure that i don't gain weight. i'm not like on a regimented diet or anything, and i don't tend to starve myself, but i'll routinely skip a day if i have a big meal. i consequently wouldn't associate a loss of appetite with depression, i'd associate it with forward-thinking - it would mean i'm looking forward to something. i'd actually associate over-eating with depression. stuffing my face would be not giving a fuck; eating less would be altering my figure for a future purpose.

the point i'm getting at isn't that one analysis is inherently superior to the other. certainly, a loss of appetite is going to be a negative indicator for some people. what i'm getting at is that it's not the kind of thing you can arrive at through talking to somebody for an hour. and, what's worse is that i wouldn't even expect an uneducated fool to be confused on this point. it's in the realm of common sense. how we can have doctors that are willing to jump to such specious deductions with such a deficit of evidence is befuddling to me.

i initially assumed my initial diagnosis was haphazard. but, i'm starting to realize it's not the case. my initial diagnosis was no less rigorous than what i'm coming up against, and consequently no less valid. and, as a result, i don't see anything wrong with pushing buttons until i get what i want - because it's ultimately all just a lot of bullshit, anyways.