neocon fascists



olbermann on rumsfeld's bullshit

quoting from edward r. murrow...

"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty," he said, in 1954.
"We must remember always that accusation is not proof, and that conviction
depends upon evidence and due process of law.
We will not walk in fear - one, of another. We will not be
driven by fear into an age of un-reason, if we dig deep in our history
and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men;
Not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to
defend causes that were - for the moment - unpopular."

perception



Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens. ~ John Homer Miller

the propaganda age



Iran and the price of oil

"I'd like to coin a term for the times in which we find ourselves: The Propaganda Age.

We've lived throught the Jet Age, Atomic Age, Space Age and Computer Age. We've experienced the Vietnam Era, the Depression era and the McCarthy Era.

Now we are in the Propaganda Age. Everything is marketing. Everything is PR. Everything is for effect. Everything is distraction: Look over there! Everything is misdirection: look at the left hand while the right hand picks your pocket. We’re told that things we see right in front of us are not what we see.

We live in a time when what matters -- the only thing that matters -- is what you can make people think." ~ Dave Johnson

my high's

from thursday, august 24 2006

basketball

my high's

from tuesday, august 22 2006

basketball

george carlin on religion

"In the Bullshit Department, a businessman can’t hold a candle to a clergyman. ‘Cause I gotta tell you the truth, folks. When it comes to bullshit, big-time, major league bullshit, you have to stand in awe of the all-time champion of false promises and exaggerated claims, religion. No contest. No contest. Religion. Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told. Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever ’til the end of time!

But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He’s all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can’t handle money! Religion takes in billions of dollars, they pay no taxes, and they always need a little more. Now, you talk about a good bullshit story.Holy Shit!"

my high's

from sunday, august 20 2006

golf 1
golf 2



"Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day."~Stephen Jay Gould

for all the conspiracy nuts

on 911, 47-story World Trade Center Building 7 was not hit by a jet and is not discussed on TV.

Look like a controlled demolition to you?

Replay a few times and notice:

The roofs dips inward
Explosions are visible running up on the right side
Explosions are visible in the front
Simultaneous symmetrical collapse (all joints fail at the same time)
Falls at free-fall speed
Falls into its own footprint without damaging surrounding buildings

Learn more about World Trade Center 7

aphorism



being nice is addictive when you're with nice people

stewart on fearmongering

pushing fear so the american people will comsume goods and obey their government like docile sheep

be afraid, be very afraid :)

the smell of fear

"The goals of the White House are not to stop terrorism; the goal of the White House is to allow terrorism to fester in order to - as the basic game plan for dictators goes - use fear to consolidate tyrannical power and do away with our Constitutional checks and balances of government and guarantee of individual liberties"



welcome to dreamland, population me
nothing here to fear, everything is free
flowing like it should, trying to be good
peaceable and just, in myself i trust
playing on a one-man team, living in a dream

what's wrong with the world?



afghani opium hits record levels

the attorney general claims terrorists live in our neighborhoods

fox news wants a "muslims only" line at the airport

shocking news that a republican senator (george allen R-VA) is racist

israel's incompetent war in lebanon was orchestrated by the bush admin

over 3400 iraqi civilians needlessly killed last month, but since they're muslim i guess they're all potential terrorists anyway so who cares

iraq has more oil than any other nation on earth, except one or two, and somehow they have a fuel shortage now, they have to import oil, jesus help us


"Some believe there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world's ills -- against misery, against ignorance, or injustice and violence. Yet many of the world's great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man. A young monk began the Protestant reformation, a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the earth, and a young woman reclaimed the territory of France. It was a young Italian explorer who discovered the New World, and 32 year old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are created equal. 'Give me a place to stand,' said Archimedes, 'and I will move the world.' These men moved the world, and so can we all." ~ Robert F. Kennedy

Day 275

from tuesday, august 15 2006

chest
head
left leg
right leg

curbing my enthusiasm



spinning spun, grinning fun,
overdoing overdone.
awareness awakes, habits break,
just in time for another mistake.


"The man who makes everything that leads to happiness depends upon himself, and not upon other men, has adopted the very best plan for living happily. This is the man of moderation, the man of manly character and of wisdom" - Plato

my high's

from thursday, august 10 2006

basketball

peace takes courage



60% of americans oppose war in iraq

but i'm sure they'd love one in iran if you sell it right.

then again, 30% of americans don't know what year 9/11 happened, wow

if the bush admin has not commited war crimes, why are they changing the law so they can't be tried for it?

bye bye loserman



lamont wins, hannity still sucks ass

my advice



if you want to stop thinking about a negative circumstance in your life which has many complex pieces of information associated with it, try to mentally reduce all that information to a single piece of information, like a 1 in binary code, so that your mind can switch back and forth between 0 (not thinking about it) and 1 (thinking about it), and gradually you can replace that unpleasant 1 with another 1. the world is full of them

make your life valuable

fo shizzle u bizzle

the secular humanist's heaven



Imagine a world rather like that in Star Trek: The Next Generation. I do not mean cavorting across the galaxy with warp drives. That is not likely. There is so far no plausible prospect for faster-than-light travel. But what is likely, indeed certain, if we keep our peace and prosperity long enough, is a world where human rights and freedoms are universally respected, and everything is free except human labor. All our needs will be satisfied by safe machines that can create anything, drawing on self-sustaining power sources like clean fusion or orbital solar. There will be no poverty. The mentally and physically ill will be cared for. The ignorant will be educated.

Everyone will be taught and encouraged to dedicate time and effort to some social good of their choosing: as teachers, builders, explorers, researchers, artists. Their week will be short, and their work fulfilling. All menial, dangerous, and unpleasant labor will be handled by machines. Everyone will be capable of understanding and appreciating themselves and their society, and will want to serve the public good, because a rich education will be freely given to all, throughout childhood and into adulthood, that encourages exactly this, and provides the skills for it.

This world will not be free of evil. There will still be criminals and loafers and attempts to abuse power or cause harm, there will still be accidents and mistakes and disasters. But the elimination of poverty and the reduction of illness and a universal humanistic education in reason and sense will make this much rarer than in any present society, as will our constant advance in knowledge and technology. And the government will have been honed and perfected by applying to its reform the scientific principles and findings of many centuries, until we have the most effective system for protecting human rights and managing the automated economy - and above all, for maintaining checks and balances, and providing quick remedies and effective preventive measures against the natural human impulses towards incompetence, negligence, corruption, and crime, as well as hubris. The government will be of the people, by the people, and for the people - a people who will almost all be healthy, happy, and civil, and a government that will be more self-critical, self-repairing, self-policing. Most natural evils will have been abolished. Genetic diseases and disabilities will be a thing of the past, illnesses cured, most injuries easily repaired. Natural disasters will be all but incapable of thwarting our countermeasures against them.

We will certainly have terraformed and colonized other worlds, at least in our own solar system, with fabricated worlds to live in as well in the very reaches of space. But at the same time we will have much more control over population pressures here on earth. Fertility will be so well managed that all men and women can turn it on or off without difficulty or side effects. With smaller population densities and cleaner technologies, a more comfortable and beautiful coexistence with nature will be possible, as cities and parks become more thoroughly and intelligently integrated.

We might even make immortality possible. It may even happen that, in the fullness of time, we will be able to transfer our minds, by transferring the patterns of our brains, into computer-simulated worlds that are in even more perfect regulation than the physical world, a true paradise. And this simulated universe, and the computers that produce it, would itself be a self-sustaining, self-maintaining, self-repairing, self-expanding artificial organism. It is possible it will never die. As the Third Law of Thermodynamics entails, it will take infinite time for the Second Law of Thermodynamics to dissipate all the available energy in the universe into unusable form. So there will always be an energy differential in the cosmos that a resourceful machine can exploit as a power source. Perhaps this will never be achieved in practice, but in theory it can be hoped for.

This is all science fiction, surely. But I hope one day to make it science fact. If it sounds like your dream of heaven, this is no accident. This is the society I want to work toward so that it may exist if not for us, then for our children, or our children's children - ultimately, so it may simply exist: so we can defy the coldness of space and the brutality of nature and create paradise in spite of them.

- Richard Carrier

spirituality



"Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual." - Carl Sagan

my high's

from thursday, august 3 2006

basketball

 
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