I refuse...

...to believe that one must live simply that others may simply live.

...to believe that the world is a zero-sum game.

...to believe that those in poverty should settle for lowered expectations.

...to believe that those in prosperity should do with less.

...to accept anything less than the glorious opportunity for prosperity for all as the birthright of humanity.

You who read this, please, I beg of you, refuse these things too.

We can all be prosperous and comfortable and advance. Our dreams of planet wide peace and plenty we once had were not delusions. Stop listening to the dubiousness and cynicism of the moment. Stop believing the worst.

With Apologies to the Foo Fighters

To the tune of My Hero:
Almost too shocking now to talk about

Take your vacation plans, toss them out

Hypocrites have consequence, messing around

Use my paystubs now, use as a shroud

There goes my paycheck

Watch it as it goes

There goes my paycheck

It's illusionary

Everyone's a creditor, as I bleed out

Through the window my buying power goes out

Games have consequence, fooling around

Out of gas so I, can't race it around

There goes my paycheck

Watch it as it goes

There goes my paycheck

It's illusionary

Kudos my paycheck you really tried your best

You know my paycheck, the one that's gone

There goes my paycheck

Watch me as I'm hosed

There goes my paycheck

It's illusionary

There goes my paycheck

Oh my G-d it's gross

There goes my paycheck

It's illusionary

What we need is...

...a crystalline matrice through which Boron and protons can be accelerated and forced to fuse as they pass through the far end like that previously mentioned merge-down of too-fast moving cars on a narrowing highway.

Then we merely have Helium and x-rays/gammas to deal with, and the first can be used directly as a charge potential generator and the second through photoelectric effect.

Remember that other power about using metal crystals to get gradients of 1GeV in a single cm. We need only 500-600KeV for the proton against a Boron nucleus at rest. So how little would it take to do that and how efficient could we be? Generating particle collider potentials is astoundingly easy. The average cathode ray tube power supply is close to it as it is. What matters is efficiency from end to end.

Think of what it would be to bring the sun's reactions millions of miles closer to the photovoltaic systems we use, as in finely divide the reactions right down to the ion-ion single reaction level. A one to one relationship. Instead of an inefficient hot plasma, we micromanage them right down.

Across an array, of just a small size, the fusion power pack might be what, the size of an air tank for a scuba? We can deal with the efficiencies by micromanaging them.

More things to toss together

From
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boron#11.C2.A0B_depleted_boron

¹¹B is also a candidate as a fuel for aneutronic fusion. When struck by a proton of about 500 Kev, it produces three alpha particles and 8.7 Mev of energy. Most other fusion reactions involving hydrogen and helium produce penetrating neutron radiation. This induces long term radioactivity in reactor structures and weakens them, as well as endangering operating personnel. The alpha particles from ¹¹B fusion can be turned directly into electric power and all radiation stops as soon as the reactor is turned off.

Also interesting:
http://discovermagazine.com/1998/may/physicswatchfusi1449

And:
http://www.ichaphysics.com/chapter-1-introduction/

Aha!

Search for this term, and check out the PDF from the SLAC people at Sanford: CHANNELED PARTICLE ACCELERATION BY PLASMA WAVES IN METALS

You'll get this link.

I obviously am not the first to think along these lines.

And people say I'm just crazy.

The fields inside solid materials are to charged particles inside their structures very very strong compared to the fields we make in accelerators. In fact, what that paper describes is actually far stronger than is necessary to fuse protium, deuterium, or tritium, or even boron and protium.

See the Wiki entry on aneutronic fusion.

Anyhow, it should be possible to create a system that easily drives an ionized fuel source to fuse and release energy. The trick then is to immediately capture said energy and transfer some back to the generator and use the rest across a load. Going beyond break-even should be relatively simple if we can figure out the absorption method properly. I'm thinking something like a solar cell, but for higher energy radiation.

You know, you can channel and even bend gamma rays like light and they do this for astrophysics. Perhaps a metallic crystalline matrix for intercepting and moderating gamma rays and x-rays down to more manageable wavelengths and then knocking electrons loose creating a potential. We'd have to be able to get rid of the charged ions in an aneutronic system, or allow neutron scattering but I think the proper beryllium compounds might work there too.

This is going to require quite an amount of calculations for some very enterprising people across a dozen disciplines starting with molecular mechanical physics to design the appropriate matrices and then chemical engineers to consider how to make those compounds and grow the crystals and perhaps engineers to figure out how to do molecular compositing...

But... a solid-state fusion battery pack should be possible.

Channeling of Charged Particles Using Atom Lattices in Crystalline Matter

At relativistic speeds, particles traveling through a crystalline lattice would due to dilation appear compressed. A lattice that was open at rest would appear to be dense, closed, impenetrable. Paths through would appear to be holes.

Any charged particles traveling through if diverted marginally laterally off an otherwise straight axis alongside others similarly diverted, all of them into collision would be like trying to jam four lanes of highway traffic at 2,000mph into one lane and none of the cars have working brakes and the highway is bounded on the sides by impenetrable walls. Crash. Or fusion.

Now further imagine that this crystal is also a dielectric, that is non-conductive but which can allow the pass-through of electric fields between two conductive surfaces to create a potential between them. Should one side, say the positive side, be connected to a pressurized hydrogen source, then the positive side would draw electrons away from the atoms and render them positively charged. As in bare protons or a proton-neutron pair. Which would then of course be free to pass through the crystalline lattice structure towards the attraction of the negatively charged side.

The ions all move from one side to the other functioning like a breakdown in the dielectric except the dielectric is not actually breaking down. The charge leakage is carried through the dielectric by the ions. Except, the ions are converging on each other. More can fit through at once than can get out at once like four lanes of traffic necking down to one.

So some of them will fuse as they exit because it's either fuse or not go through, but more are coming from behind and those will want to get out and they all cram up and some will fuse.

Now imagine that the crystalline solid is vibrating with a wave whose frequency was chosen because it was most compatible with the physical makeup of the crystalline lattice such as its distance between atoms.

So the electric fields inside the crystals as pulsing like a wake-field accelerator. Granted the fields of the atomic shells are electron fields thus negative but if the fields of the atoms ahead keep rhythmically pulling the ions forward toward the negatively charged side of the dielectric, then they serve to group the ions like tight clumps of cars way too close to divert in time to avoid collision.

Furthermore, we're talking spaces which might conceivably function like the Casimir experiment and by their nature and dimensions rule out certain fundamental frequency groups forcing certain states to be viable and others not.

Just throwing together a bunch of ideas and imagining a solid-state fusion battery.

There is nothing more dangerous

than believing you are right.

The problem with a new revolt that works is...

...that the crux of the very nature of the problems with the system being revolted against is that they are systems. How do you revolt against political parties without having another political party without said party working for its own interests which of course it logically must to remain in any competition with any other party, or even just to survive as a coherent organization?

How can you have a partyless party?

The partyless party can only be the whole of the people, acting in concert without conspiracy or organization in the way of the stand alone complex.

So I suggest first that all people interested in revolt do the following:

• De-register for a party if you are already registered and change yourself to unaffiliated.
• If you are allowed to vote in primaries despite not being registered but not affiliated, then as you are enriching yourself educationally accumulate important questions relevant to the various terms of the future be they short, medium or long and do not hesitate to ask them of the candidates.
• If you cannot vote in primaries without choosing a side, then wait till the primaries are over and ask the questions anyways. Ask them rhetorically of your fellow citizens and begin conversations of reason and debate. Be of good nature and good conscience, and without illusion and self-deception that you will or must convince another of your point of view, but merely accept and be happy with having exposed them to a meme that they may not otherwise have considered.
• Ask them of the candidates at every level. City, state, and federal, ask the questions you want answers to. Suggest that those you speak with at least, even if they do not agree on the suppositions you've made independently and between you, ask the questions as well.
• Be a party of one. The singular personal one, and the collective composite one, both at once. Take it upon yourself to be responsible enough to subordinate your personal interests to those you truly with deliberation have come to believe are the best for society at large where necessary in your conscience, and to do the opposite where necessary, and always be humble and honest with yourself as to which case is which and when.

Revolt without revolting. Change our world by changing your mind. Turn the switches and change the channels of the system. Turn on the lights of the nation which once promised to burn so brightly. Be a party of one. Be.

The dumbing down of America continues. Thank you teaching industry. You self-serving selfish motherfuckers.

 

The Educational Testing Service, in a report titled Americas Perfect Storm, cited three powerful forces that are affecting the quality of life for millions of Americans and already shaping the nations future. They are:

• The wide disparity in the literacy and math skills of both the school-age and adult populations. These skills, which play such a tremendous role in the lives of individuals and families, vary widely across racial, ethnic and socioeconomic groups.
• The seismic changes in the U.S. economy that have resulted from globalization, technological advances, shifts in the relationship of labor and capital, and other developments.
• Sweeping demographic changes. By 2030, the U.S. population is expected to reach 360 million. That population will be older and substantially more diverse, with immigration having a big impact on both the population as a whole and the work force.

Clueless in America - New York Times

The real reason American schools are failing is:

• Our school systems are not systems adjunctive to the main system of governance of society, there to serve society in the capacity of the main source of information which is on average necessary for the common citizen. They are now industries for the profit of those empowered by them, namely the collective collusion between the local government and the teachers and administrators of the educational system.

That is it. Cut and dried. No amount of distracting whining about "blaming teachers" doing a "thankless job" while crying crocodile tears can change this.

Look to the bottom third of the first page of the book shown in at this link.

Yes, 2x as many teachers in public schools come from the bottom quartile as from the top. Almost 2x as many teachers in private schools from the top quartile as the bottom.

Hmmmm... Are we surprised now that our system of education is screwed up? We hire people from the bottom of the barrel more than the top. Is it pay? No, because public school teachers make quite a nice amount of money. See the amount here. The lowest figure on that chart is more than I make as a telecom support technician with ten years of LAN/WAN/PC experience.

Granted, my pay does suck, but it is a real world private sector job and I agreed to it because it paid more than the job I came from.

Private schools do pay better, but they pay more like mid to large corporations do their upper middle management. Like say 10K a year more.

Now then, I know people don't work for free. More than most I know it. I had to pay my little sister to shlep to the house for supplies when I ran a lemonade stand by the road as a kid. People act from perceived self-interest even if it is only internalized and/or subconscious.

So, why do we not link teacher pay to quality of said teacher?

Hmmmm... Why indeed.

The answer is that the present so-called and laughingly called "educational" establishment, much like everything else in government, works to further its own interests, most notably those of the elite already in power and their hangers on.

Those who are not in power but taken care of by those who are in power will ever work for the protection of their benefactors and only work against them when they believe they can do it with relatively decent chance of success in supplanting them. Those who are in power will of course give scraps such as they believe their supporters and servants will take and like well enough to continue keeping them in power.

This is how your local city council works, your board of education, your pretty much any human hierarchical organization functions.

However, the mark of man is to be able to recognize one's own lesser instincts which are not or not as conducive to the forward progress of man's collective society and world, and to act by free will intelligence choice contrary to those recognized instincts. Our intellect says that educational systems run by government, and adjunctive to it, should be for the betterment of the intellect of our citizens. Our hearts say that the educational system should be noble and to enrich the lives of our youth. Our bestial nasty side says every man for himself and screw the results as long as I get mine.

Here are my recommendations for a guerilla attack on the problem by you the common person:

• If your education is lacking, educate yourself. Central to the effectiveness of this is self-interest.
  As I said, no one works for free. Your pay is that you will be empowered more than the man who knows nothing. The man who knows nothing is more easily swayed by emotion inducing words. The man who knows much can more confidently say "you must prove the accuracy and rightness of your case to me".
• Educate your children as early as you can in everything you can that can help them most especially language, reading, and writing, numbers, arithmetic, logic and algebra.
  We humans learn to speak from those we hear around us and we begin to build within us inferences to connect the sounds to actions and emotions we witness in the wake of those sounds. We then learn to link those sounds and inferences with letters. We learn to link the letters together. Teach your children to speak clearly as quickly as you can, and teach them the phonetic connections between what they say and the letters and words.
  Math is then the second thing to learn because logic is part and parcel of it. Your children need to learn logic and reasoning. Solving 2x+3y=20 for x teaches application of generalized rules within a rules-based system. Such ability to abstract is necessary for my next suggestion.
• Educate yourself and your children in religion and philosophy including politics and civics. Do not make glib simplistic assumptions because you are a conservative or liberal. You only serve a master other than your own interests if you do that. It is time to serve your own best interests which if you study these things, you will find in honesty to and with yourself to be much in common with the best interests of your neighbors.

America is our nation. Ours. As in you who read this are part of that collective ours. Either we all win or we all lose. For far too long we have been allowing ourselves to settle for the scraps off the tables of those in power no matter what the political or philosophical persuasion or banner, and defending those elites to maintain our scraps.

It is time to revolt America, and as thousands of years of human history clearly illustrate, the ONLY revolt that can work is the one of conscience and will. Wake up. Stop voting blindly. Think for yourself. Study. Learn. Grow. Develop. Advance. Wake up and stop flying on automatic pilot. Start making informed choices born of free will in consultation with your knowledge. Wake up. You're sleeping and our nightmares are in charge.

You may be right, you may be wrong, but you will be you. Don't you want to say at least once in your life that you were truly you and not someone else's pawn or the servant of your inner demons? Don't you want to be able to say, "I truly was for one moment me and free"?

Good luck.

In NY, don't go to the hospital for a head injury if you don't want your ass explored...

Quoted for truth:

Once he said he didn't want the rectal exam, everything should have stopped.

NO SHIT.

Don't touch me there: NY jury rejects rectal exam lawsuit - Yahoo! News

WTF do you think will happen?

In the photo caption:

The girls at the stand often wear negligees or pasties, depending on the day of the week.

Stripped-down baristas report harassment | KOMO-TV - Seattle, Washington | Local & Regional

Furthermore:

The barista said that she saw a passenger in the front seat pull a digital camera out of the glove box while he waited for his order. She warned him that photos weren't allowed, and that if he took any she'd call 911 and report harassment.

The men were in their own vehicle and therefore no one has the right to prevent them from taking pictures of anything plainly within sight of the vehicle unless it is a military or other government installation where the sights are classified by law. A drive-through with skimpy servers is not such a place. Anything you see from your car you are free to photograph.

Wear pasties, bounce the boobies, do it at a coffee shop drive-through window, and you wonder why people want to take pics, and then on top of it you call it harassment?

Your reading assignment of the moment...

Ochlocracy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Tell me you don't see relevance here to today's America.

We are the mob, we rule, but do we lead ourselves?

About the masthead update

Quite simply, if we want to maintain our way of life, our comfort and security, our plenty and convenience, our rights and privileges, then we must fight to save our nation and our form of government from the political class that has prostituted the hard work of our collective predecessors, and the self-aggrandizing who seek to exploit it to their advantage and the general detriment of the people and their legacy.

To borrow from William Wallace as portrayed by Mel Gibson, the job of the people is not to provide the government with privilege and power. It is the job of the government to ensure the privilege and power of their people.

Nature knows no such thing as brotherhood, goodness, altruism, or justice or peace. Such things are artificial constructs of an intelligent mind capable of intellectual abstraction from the concrete to the abstract and back to the concrete again. We do quite well in abstracting how to move a concrete rock. We do less well in making that abstraction into concrete action. While moving a rock is rarely a live or die proposition, the continuing stability and integrity of our nation, government, body politic, society and collective culture are.

I believe we are currently failing in this and in grave danger of self-destruction.

Nature knows the "law of the jungle". Nature knows kill or be killed. The survival of the weak, the vulnerable, and the just plain unable is not natural. It requires the strong to decide that such things are good and noble and decent, and then to make sacrifices by marshaling their forces, their strengths, their hearts to the task of making it happen. Peace, brotherhood, and justice are things bought by sweat and blood, heartache and anxiety, concentration and deliberation, and carried on the shoulders of more than we know and above all that on all that ride our hopes and dreams for the future.

We are failing now. We are not as strong as we once were. We once had a bright if somewhat at times tarnished image in spots. It was nothing we could not clean up, and we knew this not only with trusting faithful optimism, but our experience led us to this belief and we believed it not only avidly but coldly. Not only did we want to believe we were capable ever more of better, but we believed it even if we did not want to.

Our hearts are weakening, our shoulders straining, our backs breaking under the load of all our collective self-deceptions, our lies to each other and ourselves, and to the future who shall supplant and inherit our legacy.

However, all is not lost. We are still a strong people we men of Earth. We can do great things. We have done great things. We may yet do more. What is lacking is belief.

Right now I look across my land and see a people selling their futures to avoid dealing with the harsh realities, yet believing themselves brave for dealing with false but harsh unrealities. We console ourselves in the night when our doubts come a creeping upon us. We tell ourselves we could not have done better, and when the lie of it stinks enough to offend us, we pull the covers tighter and we beg for someone, G-d perhaps, to make it all go away.

Therefore since we all have abandoned our optimism, our faithful belief in ourselves and our future, it is to ourselves we must look to do one simple thing. Turn around my friends. Turn around and walk another way.

My wife told me something last night. She had a dream. She was in an office moving furniture and papers to make room and the room kept getting smaller. She moved furniture this way and that, paper here and there, and instead of making room, the expected space never materialized. Instead it got less. She began to wonder how anyone got anything in there in the first place. Then she realized she needed to get out. She tried to run down the hall but it got smaller and smaller as she went. Hall after hall, turn after turn, only smaller. Finally a door opened to her side, barely in her peripheral view and she realized the way out was not ahead or behind, but to her side.

I see this as similar to my growing realization that we've allowed ourself to be culturally fixated on a binary view of the world. Either forward or back. If you win, I lose. We get our way every time, or we get our way never. Everything always goes right or it always goes wrong. We will not compromise.

A question has passed through my mind. The question is: "What is the third choice?"

There is a third choice. Not forward continuing with more of the same malaise in our nation. Not backward tearing our nation and liberties to pieces. We must move laterally, step out of the way of the unstoppable force and the immovable object. We must change the definitions and the expectations of our own selves. We must do it together. We must maintain it. We must stick to it. We must dedicate ourselves to better, not worse.

Once we foresaw a shining future of flying cars, space colonies, lunar bases, and starflight. Now we are looking upon the developing nations such as China and India, and hypocritically shaking our finger at them and condescending to telling them they cannot have the development we had. They cannot burn coal and oil the way we did to achieve our plenty. They have to settle for less we tell them.

What arrogance we have to tell those who see our prosperity that they may not share in it. Are we next to declaim, decry, and apologize for our prosperity? Are we to rend our clothes, throw away our plenty, and cry for shame, we should not have aspired to such heights?

Do we also apologize for all those lives saved who otherwise would not have been? Do we apologize for the lives of those who would never have been born?

This all is folly. This all is arrogance. This all is false piousness, and fake concern, for we do not believe any such thing. We tell India and China they can not do these things because they are using the oil and coal we should have long long ago weaned ourselves from through technological innovation and the application of market forces to make them affordable and widespread, and by today we could help those developing nations with such technologies, and aid those nations to develop faster and without reinventing the wheel as it were. We built ourselves on the fast and cheap with then plentiful resources and now we do not want to share.

It's been said liberals are people who will give the shirt off of someone else's back. This global drive, mostly on the left, to laughably "live simply that others may simply live" will not even allow those in need to have a shirt. They speak of carrying capacity as if they had a shred of knowledge or wisdom to conceive of the complex interplay of life and the biosphere, passive and intelligently active, much less the G-d-like right to tell others how to live. They speak of lowered expectations, they portray a cannot-do attitude, and preach a despair so easy to foresee the end of, one might as well end one's life now, if one believes the doom spreading ninnies.

Worse, we are all falling for it. I've said before and will say again that anyone who sells you a solution to a problem automatically has therefore a vested interest in that problem never being solved. If it was, there would no longer be any need of them. Those who sell you milk are merely fulfilling an ongoing need that exists independent of them. Rest assured they'd never sell you a magic pill to permanently supply you will all the vitamins and minerals you would get from the milk. Not that they are themselves nefarious by this, but it is a good example.

Consider our own nation where we have recently been breaking our arms patting ourselves on the back over progress since the days of desegregation yet wailing and gnashing our teeth over the lack of progress and exhorting our population to accept more social programs in the name of eliminating white racism. If those who succeeded Doctor King truly cared about his work, we'd no longer need them as it would have been done by now. Instead, we have seen decades of ineptitude in so-called race relations as hamfistedly laid out as anything that things done by government could be done as. We have seen a client system set up where African-Americans are making great strides in some places, little in others, and all of it supports the continued empowerment of a few people at the top of the society be they local pastors, alleged community leaders, politicians mostly white and Democrat, or personalities such as Al Sharpton.

Treadmill to nowhere it seems, doesn't it. So too does everything else. We had an oil shortage that wasn't in the 70s and we are having an oil shortage that isn't in the 00's. We had exhortations to insulation, energy saving, conservation, and we had some technological advances but did anything truly change? No. The self-same people who preached these things at us preached an anti-freedom, anti-democracy, anti-progress, anti-technology, pro-socialist solution to empower themselves and of course the people would not so empower them. However, they had to have their way, and so they were empowered. They got into politics and lobbying and in groups were influential where the individual rarely is. As a result, we pay punitive taxes on gas, oil, electricity, and other energy services which we were told would go to cleaning up the world and advancing us to new technologies to supplant fossil fuels which of course they did no such thing.

If money was a solution to anything, it would actually have to be applied to the problem. Do you not think the educational system malaise of today would be what it is if the lottery income was actually going to education? Don't be silly. Of course it would, because even the educational system is corrupt and the money would never go to the payments for things to solve the problem with. They would be diverted because the system exists to empower and enrich those within it, not solve problems. The system survives by maintaining problems. It survives by continuing problems. It survives by keeping problems much like a farmer keeps livestock.

The system was supposed to be ours, and work for us. I still believe it can again. However, this cannot be until we are honest to each other and recognize that the system only works as long as it is for everyone, that all are equal and not some more equal than others, that it is not about the rich versus the middle class versus the poor, that is about all of us. If we do not, and we continue to allow ourselves to be turned upon each other by the system, we will become nothing more than livestock on a farm, vegetables in a field, commodities to be traded.

We are people. We are intelligent. We are capable of self-sacrifice, altruism, and effort on behalf of others. Every day we make use of those capabilities to create a clearing in the jungle of Earth called society and civilization. We carry each other on our shoulders. We hoist our futures high. We make the effort. We must not give up now. We must stop letting ourselves be sold on problems that don't exist, or problems which do but which are conveniently and profitably for others redefined to our detriment. We must stop having solutions to problems sold to us before we know what it is we are fixing.

We have to move to the side and look for the third choice.

We are the government. Resistance is futile. Your genetic material shall serve us.

WASHINGTON - The government plans to begin collecting DNA samples from anyone arrested by a federal law enforcement agency a move intended to prevent violent crime but which also is raising concerns about the privacy of innocent people.

Feds to collect DNA from every person they arrest - Yahoo! News

Did you know you leave bits of DNA in skin cells when you use those ATM card readers at the store? When you smoke a cigarette? Better not drop a butt.

This is a killer statement of über-naivete:

(Erik) Ablin said the DNA collection would be subject to the same privacy laws applied to current DNA sampling. That means none of it would be used for identifying genetic traits, diseases or disorders.

Emphasis mine. Italic gives first name mentioned in earlier paragraph.

And we know that none of it would be used how? What in all the 232 years of this country tells you that our government would follow the law here any more than it has followed numerous other laws we already know they violate at will. Laws we have to follow but they don't.

Those who support the expanded collection believe that DNA sampling could get violent criminals off the streets and prevent them from committing more crimes.¹

A Chicago study in 2005 found that 53 murders and rapes could have been prevented if a DNA sample had been collected upon arrest.²

"Many innocent lives could have been saved had the government began this kind of DNA sampling in the 1990s when the technology to do so first became available," Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., said. Kyl sponsored the 2005 law that gave the Justice Department this authority.³

^Okay...

1. They believe this why? Alien 3 and "double y chromos"? What exactly makes them think that DNA determines human behavior? Is this not just as stupid as the idea that skin color decides behavior? What the fuck happened to "the content of our character"? Did we not just have a self-congratulatory arm breaking back patting festival of ego masturbation for Doctor King recently? Obviously we have a long way to go if we believe DNA determines outcome of your choices. Sorry Doc King. We're working on it, but people are still pretty damn stupid and superstitious.
   
2. What study, how was it done, and exactly what rationale says that murders and rapes can be prevented by knowing the DNA of previous offenders? That we could have matched DNA found at crime scenes? We already take DNA of previously convicted offenders. Oh wait, convicted. Merely arrested is what we're doing now. As in, if you were arrested previously you obviously are a bad sort in general for all time. This is by the way yet another piece of evidence that this is either not a Christian nation or Christians are hypocrites. Hello, Jesus, turn the other cheek, forgiveness and all that. Assuming people guilty flies in the face of assuming possibility of change which is the prerequisite for forgiveness and reintegrating the transgressor in society. Guess that core tenet was missed somehow.
   
3. There's little to no evidence of any such thing no matter how much CSI you've been watching. DNA testing is just not that advanced or fast. This is 2008. Not 3008. Not even 2018. We are not the Federation. This is not Star Trek. Stop watching TV and pick up an encyclopedia.

For all you apocalyptic Christians worried about the mark of the beast, don't worry about RFID chips. Your own DNA you were born with which the L-rd your G-d put in your cells by His divine design and genius will be used instead of a mark of the beast.

Are you truly surprised?

The Raw Story | Documents prove FBI has national eavesdropping program that tracks IMs, emails and cell phones

Money shot:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been routinely monitoring the e-mails, instant messages and cell phone calls of suspects across the United States -- and has done so, in many cases, without the approval of a court.

And now juxtapose: Judges can still punish acquitted defendants - Los Angeles Times

Money shot from that:

The Supreme Court declined Monday to reconsider a legal rule that might surprise most Americans: Judges can punish defendants for certain crimes even after a jury has acquitted them of those charges.
In recent years, the justices have described the right to jury trial as one of the bedrock principles of American law. At the same time, they have been unwilling to say that a jury's not-guilty verdict on some charges means the defendant cannot be punished. Instead, the court has said judges may take into account "acquitted conduct" when they decide on a prison term.

Let me address that second article first. Acquitted conduct means conduct a jury acquitted you of. As in, the jury ruled that they did not believe to a sufficient level under the constitution and law to convict and hence as far as American legal tradition is concerned, IT IS NOT CONSIDERED TO HAVE HAPPENED IN THE EYES OF THE COURT. Only things you are actually NOT acquitted of happened. If the jury acquits you, it did not happen, they cannot retry you (generally) for that charge again under the double jeopardy rule.

So conduct that our legal tradition says did not happen can now get you a prison sentence anyhow.

Nice end run around double jeopardy, huh? The right to a jury trial is now no impediment. Even if they fail to convict, they need only convince the judge to sentence you as if you were convicted.

Now then refer to the first subject. The FBI is now feeling free to conduct surveillance at will WITHOUT ANY ORDER AT ALL.

They say corruption proceeds from the top down. The people learn it from the rulers. This is how great civilizations collapse. The corruption of the powerful and in charge breeds contempt for the structures the corrupt represent. Without respect for those structures, the society which forms around those structures cannot stand.

Our courts, our executive, and our legislative are all on a feeding frenzy of self-aggrandizement and empowerment at our expense and will bring the police powers of the state to bear against we people at will.

OF THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE, AND FOR THE PEOPLE... NEXT ELECTION, VOTE EVERYONE OUT AND DO IT EVERY ELECTION. AND FORCE THEM TO EXPLAIN THEIR UNELECTED APPOINTMENTS UNTIL THEY SCREAM FOR MERCY. This government belongs to us, not "them". We are slowly losing our freedoms regardless of which side wins elections. How sad is it that the once great USA's system can no be fairly covered with a tag line from Aliens Versus Predator 2?

"Whoever Wins, We Lose"

BULLSHIT SCARE DE JOUR

End of the world as we know it - The Arizona Republic

Money shot of stupid:

After all, no alternative energy sources scale up to the level of a few million people, much less the 6.5 billion who currently occupy Earth. Oil is necessary to extract and deliver coal and natural gas. Oil is needed to produce solar panels and wind turbines, and to maintain the electrical grid.

Read the article and in fact, do a word search on that page for the word nuclear. It doesn't occur until the first response on the page about what the French are doing.

As was pointed out by conservatives a very very very long time ago regarding the left's obsession with preventing nuclear usage at all costs, it is not so much about a fright of accident based on sober scientific and technical assessments, as it is and much more so, about their obsession with the idea that modern advanced technological society is bad.

Watch The Science Channel and try really hard to miss the subtext in shows about pandemics to come. You will have to struggle to miss the point being contended, namely than mankind's ability to travel and interact with each other puts us at risk.

MUCH of the scientific establishment is not so much the Professor from Gilligan's Island as, well, the guy who wrote this article.

Guy R. McPherson is a professor of conservation biology at the University of Arizona.

If you, like me, are well aquatinted with the fact that the majority of college and university teachers hail from the bottom quartile of college and university students, well, this is not really too surprising. Further, if you also are aware of the heavily politicized, largely radical, and mostly leftist nature of academia, then it makes more sense.

I entreat you the reader to defend yourself against this obnoxious corruption of straightforward logical rational endeavor by the more venal aspects of man, namely political aggrandizement and appeasement of ego, and try not to cast off all belief in science. Yes, my fellow technical types are rife with veritable oceans of stupid afloat with much flotsam and jetsam of utter brainlessness, but once you get past that, you might find something to make a useful stake the put through the hearts of these sociopolitical vampires, who seek to suck dry the world's belief in a brighter future.

Meanwhile, I'll do the dirty work and call this article a fucking crock of horseshit. We have technology in hand to safely and elegantly empower our society for centuries and millennia. We merely lack the gumption to tell people like this to shut the fuck up. It is not the job of academia to read tea leaves, entrails, or their own vomit after spring break and foretell the future. It is their job to find way to make the future prosperous and wondrous for all mankind.

That's the way I was trained in science, that's my story, I'm sticking to it. Too bad I have to deal with so many sensationalist prick hacks fobbing off utter crap to an undereducated, miseducated, and all too credulous society of people emotionally drained by a political system running on crisis creation and mismanagement, and with the attention span of a Bill Clinton groupie.

Hmmmm...

Iranian news agency: Syria arrests Saudi official tied to Mughniyeh death | Jerusalem Post

I wonder what SA had to gain by Mug's death. Removing the embarrassment of someone who looked like the offspring of Bruce Vilanch and Harvey Fierstein being associated with terrorism?

Who ya gonna... oh fuck it, just read the article...

Officials with the Homestead Police Department have hired paranormal investigators after several unexplained events in the station, including a typewriter that types by itself, blasts of cold air and slamming doors.

Police Hire Paranormal Investigators After Unexplained Events - Orlando News Story - WKMG Orlando

Abstinence-only as bad as condoms-only education...

State lawmakers said the myths are spreading because of Florida's abstinence-only sex education, Local 6 reported.

Survey: Fla. Teens Believe Drinking Bleach Will Prevent HIV - Orlando News Story - WKMG Orlando

News flash America, YOU ACTUALLY HAVE TO TEACH THE KIDS YOURSELVES AND STOP RELYING ON THE STATE.

Unless of course you like the job the Germans did with their state educational system seventy years ago because it got all the kids goosestepping in the same direction.

Young teen pussy, THE place to score over the counter pain medication for school personnel...

Money shot of a quote, right at the end:

The invasiveness of the search also has to be weighed against the evil it was aimed at preventing. "Remember," the school district's lawyer recently told ABC News by way of justification, "this was prescription-strength ibuprofen." It's a good thing the school took swift action, before anyone got unauthorized relief from menstrual cramps.

Reason Magazine - The School Crotch Inspector

Read it and weep for the loss of our common sense.

A story which proves police marksmanship, public relations, and psychology classes are not working...

It has been one of the more lingering questions surrounding the shooting of Sean Bell: How can anyone sustain 19 gunshot wounds and live to tell about it?

Doctor Tells of a 19-Gunshot-Wound Survivor - City Room - Metro - New York Times Blog

Mr. Bell, Mr. Guzman and Trent Benefield had just left Mr. Bell’s bachelor party at Club Kalua in Jamaica, Queens, when officers investigating the club, believing the men were armed, followed them. In the confrontation that followed, five officers opened fire with 50 shots, killing Mr. Bell and wounding Mr. Benefield and Mr. Guzman.

Emphasis mine.

Our nation's criminals to their credit consistently display better marksmanship, efficiency of ammunition usage, and discretion in choice of targets and times to shoot than our nation's police. Obviously, we're doing something wrong when an old wise guy can be more effective throwing someone a quick beating then telling them to go back to Jersey, than our national intelligence and military services are with waterboarding suspected terrorists.

Oh well. At least if the shit gets heavy in Iraq we can send these keystone cops.

There is eerie Zen-like simplicity in the joke about just needing three (now two) more bullets to reunite the Beatles.

Just in time for global warming...

An Iranian has opened the world's most northerly kebab outlet in the freezing wastelands of the Arctic circle.

World's most northerly kebab shop opened - Telegraph

Now we just need gyros, chicken, and falafel to be represented and we're all set for 7th avenue of the north.

Arkansas evolves and advances to at least the modernity of West Virginia

Toddlers can no longer marry in Ark.; state repeals law that removed minimum marriage age

Can we get a law requiring minimum competence in English spelling, grammar, and composition before being eligible to run for public office?

A girl to pray for...

A teenager who survived a murder-suicide that wiped out her family last year placed a frantic 911 call before she knew that her brother was the killer.

SoCal slayings survivor's 911 call: 'My family is dead

Just to be fair and equal, but of course, you might want to say a really big collective prayer for the species.

A boy to pray for...

The 12-year-old boy had finished his homework and was playing a video game when he heard his mother cry out. Rushing to her aid, he found her on the kitchen floor, straddled by a fellow resident of their Prince George's County boarding house, the man's hands wrapped tightly around her neck, the boy said yesterday.

Md. Boy, 12, Kills Man Attacking Mother - washingtonpost.com

How do you come back from that?

My phrase of the moment, you heard it here!

 

Paradigm Mismatch

Use it at will to replace "cognitive dissonance". Same thing, but more Net 3.0 or whatever.

Short meaning: when two concepts contingent upon one another are juxtaposed they are found to be in logical contradiction at one or more levels but which must by their related nature not be in contradiction.

Such as teaching people about freedom and rights but from the point of view that they are granted by the state, not something the state humbly recognizes exist independent of it.

Third grade kids: your prime source of interesting news today!

Yes, evidently a group of nine third grade children planned to attack and detain a teacher as you can read here: Top Stories - Police Release Photos of Weapons in Waycross Plot.

Why? Fuck knows. Capper at end:

The District Attorney is handling the case and students will most likely face juvenile charges of Unruly Child.

Well implicit in that charge is the idea that there's such a thing as a Ruly Child. In other words, there's a standard of compliance, obedience, and submission.

Maybe that's why so many kids are having problems... we teach them all about freedom, but we do it under a framework of demanding submission from them as if freedom is not a natural right or G-d given, but a privilege handed out conditionally by allegedly benevolent masters.

The paradigm mismatch©® must be getting to our society.

Army recognizes straight marriage belatedly...

In this article, Army does about-face on soldier couples in Iraq - CNN.com, you can read how the US Army has finally stopped thinking about who is blowing who in a broken Humvee at the back of the motor pool long enough to notice that the straights they champion, ohmigawd, no way, actually get married and sometimes BOTH of them are serving. As in with guns, not cocktails.

Welcome US Army to the year... I forget, when did humans begin mating and forming families?