hunter
hunter's JournalPay attention, activists...
... it's not simply the police, it's giant corporations too and in many cases they are one and the same.
That doesn't mean you should allow your activist group to lose focus in a fog of suspicion, just be careful.
Every time I get involved in edgy stuff I have experiences that are not quite right. Part of it is me, my "real world" self is somewhere on the autistic spectrum and a bit paranoid, but I've often been surprised when dynamic members of an activist group get absorbed into the system they were fighting. I don't think it's "selling out" as is often claimed, or people lying to themselves caught up in the romance of their activism. I think many were always on the other side but profiting somehow from their participation in the activist group.
My first experiences were with peace groups, environmental groups, and anti-nuclear groups. It is a little unsettling to see some of the same people I knew back then working for defense contractors, fossil fuel companies, so-called "mainstream media," real estate developers, and yes, in a few cases, law enforcement.
Sure. people "grow up" and join the "real world," but I think that concept is in itself propaganda fed to us by the oligarchs and plutocrats controlling this society. Our society is a very sophisticated kind of feudalism and this becomes more and more apparent as we run up against the limits of the earth's natural environment and our own human nature.
The yokes we serfs wear did not chafe so badly when fossil fuels were cheap and nature absorbed our environmental assaults without pushing back. But now nature is pushing back and we are about to suffer the same consequences any innovative species that experiences exponential growth does. We might avoid the worst of the storm by voluntarily limiting our growth, by voluntarily limiting our use of natural resources, but we won't. Nature is going to smack us down the old fashioned way and humans will accelerate this process of population collapse by tribalistic wars and oppression.
That's what all this stuff is about; the NSA stuff, the infiltration of activist groups, the absurd levels of "defense" spending. The people in control now want to be in control when the dust of the collapse settles. They won't be, of course, because they have no fundamental understanding of the problem, they think they "know" people, they are masters at manipulating people, but they don't understand the natural environment, they don't understand that we all live and die by the same rules of life that are as old as life itself.
The patent and copyright system is broken.
There are so many bogus patents and copyrights, and so many well-financed trolls, that the progress of arts and sciences in the USA is significantly impeded.
Cleaning up the mess will not be easy.
I've no objection to the concept of patents or copyrights themselves, I do not begrudge an author like J.K. Rowling a single penny of her wealth, but for every author or innovator like her making the world a brighter place there are dozens of intellectual property trolls trying to drag us back into the darkness.
My own speculation would be that there are possible pasts, just as there are possible futures.
The past is not set in stone, neither is the future.
The photons are not so much "entangled" as they simply don't bother to have any state until they are held to one in the present. From our biologically evolved and prejudiced perspective, the "past" is set in stone and immutable, so it appears the photons are "entangled." What's actually happening is that in the present where this experiment exists, there is only one past that "explains" the results. But there is also a time-distance where the results of the experiment are lost and the photons are disentangled.
There is no solid past or solid future. A "present" perspective shapes it all.
The origins of our own biological perspective, the perspective that makes it so difficult for us to understand this universe, the perspective that makes subjects like quantum physics, time, or relativity seem so alien and perverse, are pretty clear. Each and every one of us have ancestors "all the way back" to the "beginning of life" who somehow managed to survive and reproduce. What are the "odds" of that, that you would be reading this looking at a picture that "demonstrates" "entanglement" ??? It is clearly a meaningless question.
It is what it is, nothing more, nothing less.
No, and same for time travel too. Sorry.
I don't think this universe is built that way.
Everything is speeding along at the "speed of light" and there is no way to go "faster" or "slower." Everyone reading this post is zipping along at the "speed of light," none of us are anything more than shifting, shimmering patterns in the light.
We still live in a universe of near-infinite possibilities however. I think intelligent beings of the "free will" variety are able to create any kind of community they wish, becoming essentially immortal (if that is even important to them), essentially creating their own neighborhood realities of increasing sophistication.
(Maybe some of those UFOs are the creation of intelligent dinosaurs who evolved here on earth. Distant relatives of a sort.)
That our species has any future as intelligent beings is still undetermined. The odds seem to be against us. We are still flying blind. A future where we are extinct or much less "intelligent" and similar to our ancestors of 4 million years past seems very likely.
Profile Information
Name: HunterGender: Male
Current location: California
Member since: 2002
Number of posts: 38,311
