Thursday, October 27, 2011
2007 USAF nuclear weapons incident
By CNu at October 27, 2011 0 comments
Labels: Living Memory , unspeakable
worse than originally thought
Video - Move along Canadians, nothing to see over here...,
By CNu at October 27, 2011 0 comments
Labels: unintended consequences
the last of the B-53's
By CNu at October 27, 2011 10 comments
Labels: unspeakable
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
profgeo leads the class to the root cause analysis
By CNu at October 26, 2011 12 comments
towards a world war III scenario
By CNu at October 26, 2011 1 comments
Labels: The Great Game
the great game
By CNu at October 26, 2011 0 comments
Labels: The Great Game
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
5 reasons occupy wall st. is bound to fail...,
Video - Brett Arends on why occupy Wall St. will fail.
By CNu at October 25, 2011 17 comments
Labels: common sense , The Hardline , weather report
banking blockades apparently work
By CNu at October 25, 2011 0 comments
Labels: corporatism
how corporate interests attack science
Some of the scary rate-of-change statistics in the book:
- Climate hasn’t changed this much in at least the last 850,000 years
- When we burn fossil fuels like coal and oil, we’re releasing carbon dioxide thousands of times faster than it took to form coal and oil deposits.
- Carbon dioxide levels have risen 40% in just the past 250 years
- Never have greenhouse gases tripled within a few centuries, and we’re destroying the plants that could help to sequester CO2.
By CNu at October 25, 2011 2 comments
Labels: corporatism , weather report
hazard of confidence: the illusion of validity
By CNu at October 25, 2011 2 comments
Labels: What IT DO Shawty...
who you are..,
By CNu at October 25, 2011 3 comments
Labels: What IT DO Shawty...
Monday, October 24, 2011
the prophet (PBUH) ridin too?
Mohammed meets the prophets Ismail, Is-hak and Lot in paradise. From the Apocalypse of Muhammad, written in 1436 in Herat, Afghanistan (now in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris). |
By CNu at October 24, 2011 2 comments
Labels: alkahest , azoth , entheogenesis
the hidden world
Video - excerpted interview with Prof. Carl Ruck.
By CNu at October 24, 2011 1 comments
Labels: entheogenesis , History's Mysteries
mushrooms myth and mithras
By CNu at October 24, 2011 0 comments
Labels: entheogenesis , History's Mysteries
drug culture, ecstasy and philosophy in ancient greece
Video - excerpted interview with Michael Rinella.
By CNu at October 24, 2011 0 comments
Labels: entheogenesis , eucharist
Sunday, October 23, 2011
who's not a salesman?
Video - Salesman by Albert Maysles
Sales IS the epitome of the psychopathology of American Capitalism. Salesmen capitalize on weaknesses due to human cognitive errors to dishonorably extract consumer's creative value (their hard-earned money). Bosses capitalize on salesmen by using same manipulative techniques on employees to extract most of their time and creativity. Sales bosses do absolutely nothing creative and yet extract most of the productive value of consumers and their employees. Dale. | Why do you impart (negative) morality to sales? I see sales itself, as inherently amoral. Surely you are not against consciously influencing the decisions of other people? Or consciously influencing yourself? MLK, Gandhi, Steve Jobs --and of course Hitler, David Duke, Bill Gates :). Whether I'm selling crack or a fitness regime, myself as a social success, a palatable worldview and coping strategy, or really killer solar panels, the goal is always to influence the behavior or worldview of others. DD. |
By CNu at October 23, 2011 41 comments
Labels: Kwestin
the basic truth of the great-many-versus-very-few protest narrative
This isn't evidence that mainstream politicians are caving to the movement, of course, but what it does show is that those same politicians are endorsing OWS rhetoric, and by extension tacitly admitting the basic truth of the great-many-versus-very-few protest narrative.
Rush chalks this up to a media deception, a mirage of TV images and “media-Democrat-industrial complex” manipulations designed to con the country into believing in the existence of a mass movement.
The reality, of course, is that people like Rush, Romney and Obama are all becoming cognizant of the deep frustrations that exist across the political spectrum and are growing desperate to prevent the powder keg from blowing completely – hence the intense effort to describe OWS as a top-down manipulation.
Of course the notion that this is all a media fabrication is ludicrous. Dylan Ratigan didn’t invent four million people in foreclosure, he didn’t invent ten trillion dollars in bailouts, and he didn’t invent Wall Street’s $160 billion bonus pool the year after the crash of its own creation.
People out there do not need media figures to tell them how fucked things are, or how pissed they should be that the same bankers who caused the crash are now enjoying state-supported bonuses in the billions, while everyone else gets squeezed. As someone who has been covering this stuff for three years, I can say with confidence that people across the country don’t need a push to be angry. They’re already there, and have been there for years. Rush should go hang out outside a foreclosure court in his home state of Florida for a few hours, if he wants to see where the rising heat under these protests is coming from.
Anyway, the hysterical responses from the Rushes of the world are just more signs that these protests are working. I never thought I’d see it, but some of the dukes and earls high up in America’s Great Tower of Bullshit are starting to blink a little bit. They seem genuinely freaked out that OWS doesn’t have leaders or a single set of demands, which in addition to being very encouraging is quite funny.
By CNu at October 23, 2011 0 comments
Labels: complications , narrative
frame yourself before others frame you?
Video - Bill Maher New Rules on Occupy Wall Street
About framing: It's normal. Everybody engages in it all the time. Frames are just structures of thought that we use every day. All words in all languages are defined in terms of frame circuits in the brain. But, ultimately, framing is about ideas, about how we see the world, which determines how we act.
In politics, frames are part of competing moral systems that are used in political discourse and in charting political action. In short, framing is a moral enterprise: it says what the character of a movement is. All politics is moral. Political figures and movements always make policy recommendations claiming they are the right things to do. No political figure ever says do what I say because it's wrong! Or because it doesn't matter! Some moral principles or other lie behind every political policy agenda.
Two Moral Framing Systems in Politics
Conservatives have figured out their moral basis and you see it on Wall Street: It includes: The primacy of self-interest. Individual responsibility, but not social responsibility. Hierarchical authority based on wealth or other forms of power. A moral hierarchy of who is "deserving," defined by success. And the highest principle is the primacy of this moral system itself, which goes beyond Wall Street and the economy to other arenas: family life, social life, religion, foreign policy and especially government. Conservative "democracy" is seen as a system of governance and elections that fits this model.
Though OWS concerns go well beyond financial issues, your target is right: the application of these principles in Wall Street is central, since that is where the money comes from for elections, for media and for right-wing policy-making institutions of all sorts on all issues.
The alternative view of democracy is progressive: Democracy starts with citizens caring about one another and acting responsibly on that sense of care, taking responsibility both for oneself and for one's family, community, country, people in general and the planet. The role of government is to protect and empower all citizens equally via The Public: public infrastructure, laws and enforcement, health, education, scientific research, protection, public lands, transportation, resources, art and culture, trade policies, safety nets, and on and on. Nobody makes it one their own. If you got wealthy, you depended on The Public and you have a responsibility to contribute significantly to The Public so that others can benefit in the future. Moreover, the wealthy depend on those who work and who deserve a fair return for their contribution to our national life. Corporations exist to make life better for most people. Their reason for existing is as public as it is private.
By CNu at October 23, 2011 2 comments
Labels: complications , narrative
Saturday, October 22, 2011
how to spot a liar
Video - Pam Myer How to spot a liar.
Now speaking of trust, ever since I wrote this book, "Liespotting," no one wants to meet me in person anymore, no, no, no, no, no. They say, "It's okay, we'll email you." (Laughter) I can't even get a coffee date at Starbucks. My husband's like, "Honey, deception? Maybe you could have focused on cooking. How about French cooking?"
So before I get started, what I'm going to do is I'm going to clarify my goal for you, which is not to teach a game of Gotcha. Liespotters aren't those nitpicky kids, those kids in the back of the room that are shouting, "Gotcha! Gotcha! Your eyebrow twitched. You flared your nostril. I watch that TV show 'Lie To Me.' I know you're lying." No, liespotters are armed with scientific knowledge of how to spot deception. They use it to get to the truth, and they do what mature leaders do everyday; they have difficult conversations with difficult people, sometimes during very difficult times. And they start up that path by accepting a core proposition, and that proposition is the following: Lying is a cooperative act. Think about it, a lie has no power whatsoever by its mere utterance. Its power emerges when someone else agrees to believe the lie.
So I know it may sound like tough love, but look, if at some point you got lied to, it's because you agreed to get lied to. Truth number one about lying: Lying's a cooperative act. Now not all lies are harmful. Sometimes we're willing participants in deception for the sake of social dignity, maybe to keep a secret that should be kept secret, secret. We say, "Nice song." "Honey, you don't look fat in that, no." Or we say, favorite of the digiratti, "You know, I just fished that email out of my spam folder. So sorry."
But there are times when we are unwilling participants in deception. And that can have dramatic costs for us. Last year saw 997 billion dollars in corporate fraud alone in the United States. That's an eyelash under a trillion dollars. That's seven percent of revenues. Deception can cost billions. Think Enron, Madoff, the mortgage crisis. Or in the case of double agents and traitors, like Robert Hanssen or Aldrich Ames, lies can betray our country, they can compromise our security, they can undermine democracy, they can cause the deaths of those that defend us.
Deception is actually serious business. This con man, Henry Oberlander, he was such an effective con man British authorities say he could have undermined the entire banking system of the Western world. And you can't find this guy on Google; you can't find him anywhere. He was interviewed once, and he said the following. He said, "Look, I've got one rule." And this was Henry's rule, he said, "Look, everyone is willing to give you something. They're ready to give you something for whatever it is they're hungry for." And that's the crux of it. If you don't want to be deceived, you have to know, what is it that you're hungry for? And we all kind of hate to admit it. We wish we were better husbands, better wives, smarter, more powerful, taller, richer -- the list goes on. Lying is an attempt to bridge that gap, to connect our wishes and our fantasies about who we wish we were, how we wish we could be, with what we're really like. And boy are we willing to fill in those gaps in our lives with lies. Fist tap Arnach.
By CNu at October 22, 2011 4 comments
Labels: The Straight and Narrow
the pattern behind self-deception
Video - Michael Shermer explains the pattern behind self-deception.
Another update: You will recall I introduced you guys to the Quadro Tracker. It's like a water dowsing device. It's just a hollow piece of plastic with an antenna that swivels around. And you walk around, and it points to things. Like if you're looking for marijuana in students' lockers, it'll point right to somebody. Oh, sorry. (Laughter) This particular one that was given to me finds golf balls, especially if you're at a golf course and you check under enough bushes. Well, under the category of "What's the harm of silly stuff like this?" this device, the ADE 651, was sold to the Iraqi government for 40,000 dollars apiece. It's just like this one, completely worthless, in which it allegedly worked by "electrostatic magnetic ion attraction," which translates to "pseudoscientific baloney" -- would be the nice word -- in which you string together a bunch of words that sound good, but it does absolutely nothing. In this case, at trespass points, allowing people to go through because your little tracker device said they were okay, actually cost lives. So there is a danger to pseudoscience, in believing in this sort of thing.
So what I want to talk about today is belief. I want to believe, and you do too. And in fact, I think my thesis here is that belief is the natural state of things. It is the default option. We just believe. We believe all sorts of things. Belief is natural; disbelief, skepticism, science, is not natural. It's more difficult. It's uncomfortable to not believe things. So like Fox Mulder on "X-Files," who wants to believe in UFOs? Well, we all do, and the reason for that is because we have a belief engine in our brains. Essentially, we are pattern-seeking primates. We connect the dots: A is connected to B; B is connected to C. And sometimes A really is connected to B, and that's called association learning.
We find patterns, we make those connections, whether it's Pavlov's dog here associating the sound of the bell with the food, and then he salivates to the sound of the bell, or whether it's a Skinnerian rat, in which he's having an association between his behavior and a reward for it, and therefore he repeats the behavior. In fact, what Skinner discovered is that, if you put a pigeon in a box like this, and he has to press one of these two keys, and he tries to figure out what the pattern is, and you give him a little reward in the hopper box there -- if you just randomly assign rewards such that there is no pattern, they will figure out any kind of pattern. And whatever they were doing just before they got the reward, they repeat that particular pattern. Sometimes it was even spinning around twice counterclockwise, once clockwise and peck the key twice. And that's called superstition, and that, I'm afraid, we will always have with us.
I call this process "patternicity" -- that is, the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise. When we do this process, we make two types of errors. A Type I error, or false positive, is believing a pattern is real when it's not. Our second type of error is a false negative. A Type II error is not believing a pattern is real when it is. So let's do a thought experiment. You are a hominid three million years ago walking on the plains of Africa. Your name is Lucy, okay? And you hear a rustle in the grass. Is it a dangerous predator, or is it just the wind? Your next decision could be the most important one of your life. Well, if you think that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator and it turns out it's just the wind, you've made an error in cognition, made a Type I error, false positive. But no harm. You just move away. You're more cautious. You're more vigilant. On the other hand, if you believe that the rustle in the grass is just the wind, and it turns out it's a dangerous predator, you're lunch. You've just won a Darwin award. You've been taken out of the gene pool. Fist tap Arnach.
By CNu at October 22, 2011 3 comments
Labels: big don special , magical thinking
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