Month: January 2013

From here: http://dyn.politico.com/members/forums/thread.cfm?catid=1&subcatid=71&threadid=7354041&start=31&CurrentPage=2

It’s not popping up.  It will, I suspect, but if I typed it, why chance it?

They claim “our goal [is] trying to pass laws that make it easier to
make our communities safe”, but any fool can see that gun control, so
called, is ineffective. You make communities safer by locking up the bad
guys more often and for longer.  It is no coincidence that as our crime
rates are dropping substantially that our prison populations are
swelling.

What you do NOT do when you ban ANY gun is make that gun less available to criminals.  By DEFINITION anyone who is a criminal does not obey the law.  There
are hundreds of millions of firearms in this country, and there can be
ZERO question that absent a Nazi style police state that large numbers
of them will remain in circulation long after a ban on gun is
passed.

And we need to be clear: Bloomberg
is an unprincipled elitist who wants to tell people he considers his
social inferiors what to do, what to eat, and what access to effective
self protection he will allow them.  He has a
standard for himself–the billionaire standard–and to the extent he
thinks about anyone else, it is to tell us to live our lives the way he
and his fellow plutocrats see fit.

Obama does not fight Big Money: they PUT HIM IN OFFICE, TWICE.  Think about it: what form of government would aspiring totalitarians want?  One that is expanding, or one that is shrinking?  That is a no brainer.

Any
and all laws these idiots might get passed will make it harder for hard
working Americans to defend themselves while contributing to overall
increases in violent crime, like happened in Great Britain and
Australia.

We can’t give these awful people an inch.  Not one
millimeter.  They will have their police departments in open revolt if
they push this too far.  Most of them are on our side, that of decency and fairness.

My own world view–the cognitive paradigm within which I construct my mental reality–is that we all exist within a web of connections.  I am a sort of nexus point, a node in a network, but to say that I, per se, am somehow uniquely wonderful in any way is really just not a necessary or useful sentiment or statement.

As I live my life, the question I ask myself: what work needs to be done?  As I look across the “home” within which I live, where is the unfinished laundry, the unwashed dishes, the meals that need cooking?  Put another way, the life which needs living?

We are meant to move.  The most pernicious thing you can do to any person is to denigrate in any way the process of work.  Clearly, in our modern world we often live as machines.  We do things which are meaningless to us because the context is so large we can’t grasp it in an emotionally meaningful way.  But even in a cubicle farm, if you try to do things with a pleasurable quality of consciousness, relaxation, and diligence, it will be better for you. And these things are possible.  You can control them.

The point I wanted to make here though is that arrogance is INHERENTLY separation.  The process of feeling superior to the web within which you live your life is the process of feeling apart from it, separate from it.

No perceptive person can fail to grasp their sundry limitations, or the countless ways in which they depend on others.

Freedom is defined by how many types of behavior are possible.  If everyone is self destructive, then someone who is mentally healthy is the outlier.  If everyone acts the same, the one who acts differently defines the extent of freedom.

The great fallacy of the Left is that they are tolerant.  They are not.  They are bigoted towards any internally directed forms of morality, with religion being the most obvious example.

I wrote a note to myself some time ago that “A definition is the most basic fact.”  I feel like I posted it here, but would approach it perhaps differently than I did before.  Clearly, words can be made to mean anything, but a definition is what I mean, and the better the definition, the better you understand me.  It is a means for organizing thought, and for preventing miscommunication.

In actual science, the value is that you can POINT to a concrete thing or process or outcome, which you then term a “fact”. 

However, the need for definitions in the Humanities is perhaps only heightened by the possibility of ambiguity.  It is perhaps not overstating the case to say that virtually all of our contemporary social ills stem from abuses of language stemming from failures of definition.

What you mean by “justice” matters, does it not?  Truth?  Beauty?

This phrase keeps popping in my head.  When this happens, I try to explain what it means.

Here is an interesting data point I had not considered: Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was only 18 when she had him.  She had a November birthday, 1942, and he was born in August of 1961.  This means she got pregnant when she was BARELY 18.

Frank Marshall Davis, who I have argued seems most likely to me to have been the father, was born in 1905, meaning that in 1960 he was 55.  This is a 37 year difference.

Over and above the fact that one does not have to think long or hard about the wisdom of admitting an avowed and active Communist as a father, the mere difference in age, combined with the difference in race, would  have been HUGELY controversial.  He could have been her grandfather.

And to the point of my little “voice” (no, I don’t hear actual voices), this feels as I look at it (good fodder there for NLP’ers) more like a rape, more like an exercise of the droit du seigneur, more like a slave master raping a slave. More like a white man and a submissive, powerless black woman.

Why did she abandon young Barry to return to Indonesia?   Did she feel no maternal tugs at all?  Was it that she, too, was on an FBI watch list, and wanted to protect him?  Or was it that she always felt like he was a child forced on her, a product of the cruel abuse of her innocence?

At some point in our history, it would be interesting for someone to get a sample of Obama’s DNA somehow, and compare it to the Davis’s.  That part can be done scientifically, even if the actual personal histories are buried.

If you’re like most people, you have never heard of Jainism, which is a sect typically folded within “Hinduism”, and in which all life is sacred.  They believe all life is sentient, even plants.  Different types of life have a different number of senses.  Plants, if memory serves, have one, which is quite consistent with Cleve Backsters finding.  They are not oblivious to the world around them.  They can’t see, and can’t think, but they can feel.  Just think back to Backster’s initial finding, in which the plant more or less got excited when it was watered, in a manner not entirely unlike dogs when they are about to go for a walk.

The ultimate act of charity in this creed is to starve yourself to death, so that you do not live at the expense of ANY other form of life.  Their holy men sweep the roads ahead of them, lest they inadvertently kill an insect.

You can read more here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/jainism/

Maybe take a break from the news for a bit.  Learn something new.

You could do a simple experiment in which a plant is hooked up to a polygraph machine, and a researcher gets a series of notes, 5 of which say “Do not burn the plant”, and a sixth of which say Do burn the plant.  You could randomize them per whatever protocol is currently in vogue.  You could even put the researcher in a separate room, from which no conceivable hormonal transmitter could emerge to affect the plant, although I think it might be important for the researcher to be able to SEE the plant.  You could ignite the flame remotely.

I think the results would be strong and consistent, and utterly inconsistent with current biological paradigms of life.

As I say often with regard to our political world., there will come a time, hopefully, when we wake up and wonder how so many people could have been so stupid for so long.

Christ famously taught that “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”  What needs to be pointed out is that we need not revile ourselves, we need not hate ourselves or others.  Certainly, we need not judge others.  What we need to understand is that if we were already relatively perfected, we would not exist on this planet at all.  The simple fact that someone is HERE, ALREADY implies a relative lack of spiritual development.  This is a remedial education camp.

Sin is separation from God, which happens when we fall short of hearing the call of the best within us, when we cloud our true perceptions with rationalizations, and emotional coverups, to justify doing what is expedient but not right.  Life on this planet is already separation from God, who is much harder to see here.

These are my intuitions.  I want to be clear that I base them in part on experiences I have had, but in part as well on things I have simply read.

Everyone should know this name. Watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGRluepFwdg

What you will see there is a simple, EASILY replicable experiment WHICH CANNOT BE EXPLAINED WITHIN A MATERIALISTIC PARADIGM.

What so-called skeptics do with data like this is not refute it–they can’t, as there is no conceivable explanation for this within traditional paradigms–but ignore it.  They have successfully ignored this work for 40 years or more.

Why? What is the benefit to thinking of man as machine?  What advantage accrues to anyone in defending an idea that is not just empirically wrong, but pernicious morally?

Myth Busters apparently replicated his research.  So too can any contemporary researcher with simple courage and curiosity.

I want to be clear: most large paradigmatic shifts have come from very small outliers, things which could not be worked into existing theories, which could not be explained by existing theories.  In almost all cases, existing theories were modified with radically new CONTEXTS.  One could almost say they were supplemented.

Newton did not become wrong when Einstein proposed General Relativity, nor did General Relativity lose its usefulness when it was falsified as a final explanation by Bell’s Theorem.

I remember Carl Sagan talking about the significance of how Mars moved within Ptolemaic astronomical models.  They could make everything but Mars work.  But in the end, a heliocentric view of the solar system had to be adopted to explain, what?  The DATA.  The stuff which REAL scientists rely on, rather than fashionable prejudice.

Einstein predicted light would bend around the sun.  It did, and we adopted his theory.  He predicted that quantum theory would imply information transfer at faster than light speeds, which within his model were impossible.  He was wrong.  Such transfers have been measured.

Science is in theory always advancing, always willing to kill its intellectual children–to which concrete human beings are in psychologically comprehensible ways quite attached–in search of a better idea.

Who out there has the courage to pursue this avenue of investigation?

From here  I can’t see it, even though it should have gone up, so I’m reposting.

Just as many children would have died had he used the two pistols as
originally reported.  The worst school massacre in American history
happened nearly 100 years ago, when someone bombed a school.
 
Banning
“assault rifles” will accomplish NOTHING, just as it accomplished
nothing the LAST TIME they were banned.  This is all about the
government eroding, one by one, all the rights which constitute
freedom. 
The Constitution exists to PROTECT US not just from one another–that is properly primarily the role of State and Local law–but
to constrain a Federal Government which was seen as a necessary evil,
and whose primary role was the protection of the United States as a
whole, and regulating the relations of the sundry States.

There is ZERO evidence indicating ANY of these laws will accomplish anything meaningful.  On the contrary, gun bans in many other countries have led to ESCALATED
violence.  Britain has over 3 times as many violent crimes per capita
as we do.  Chicago sees hundreds of murders annually.  There are
hundreds of millions of firearms in circulation, and if they are banned,
it will only affect law abiding citizens.

By DESIGN these
laws ONLY hurt law abiding citizens.  They will do NOTHING to curtail
crime, and I am of the mind that ALL limits on gun ownership need to be
opposed because it is clear that the end game of Obama and his cronies
is to vitiate the Second Amendment outright, which is a necessary step
on the road to the global tyranny powerful elites are trying to foist on
us simply because they want to and think they can.