Undermining Authority Figures and Changing Worldviews

I love learning about things which cause me to change my worldviews and value systems.

Typically the type of information that does that is stuff which questions authority and the way it has always been. We are taught from a young age to subscribe to an authority trusting worldview so that we can be exploited for various forms of profit.

As you peal away the bogus layers of authority and associated fraud you get a much better view of humanity uninhibited by the fraud and arbitrary contraints associated with those who want to exert extreme coercive persuasion over the lives of others. And it gives me hope that I can help think up ways to live life more fully than I have, and if I am lucky sort out ways to undermine bogus authority on a grand scale.

People act in quite predictable ways. Many of the fraud business models bank on people not seeing beyond a framework that is set up, or having no reach for their message if they do see beyond it. The web allows you at least somewhat of a workaround to those problems, and search allows you to intercept the minds of people dealing with serious problems (perhaps problems far greater than my own trivial garbage I rant about). I am always one in need of some greater purpose to be happy, but at least for a little bit I think I got one again. Yippie.

But then again it is not enough to just tear things down, you have to help think up ways to build things back up. Which is hard given my limited and biased worldview.

I used to kinda hate the idea of learning, teaching, and doing marketing because I think that ultimately most marketing is about manipulating others for personal gain, but what if you could find a profitable and scalable business model that enriched participants in the depth and quality of their lives? Not saying I could do it. Just that I think it would be cool. And love when others do it to me.

I also know when I am excited and motivated because I read and type letters in the wrong order. I think we all have some natural baseline level of dyslexia that comes out more or less depending on our congruent moods.

AMERICA: Freedom To Fascism

Is the US's IRS Collecting Income Tax Legal?

Related: The Money Masters

And a quote from the president who was sucker enough to create The Federal Reserve:

I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world - no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men. - Woodrow Wilson

Fascism is capitalism in decline.

Spectacle

So last night a guy called me, who seemed like a fan. Quite weird that to me...that someone would think highly enough of me to be a fan.

I am so fucked up with life on so many fronts, and that is most likely largely because I tell myself that I am and then act the part, but it still is quite odd to me that some people like me that much.

I know I need to like myself more, but I think one of my biggest problems is that most of my self improvement initiatives are contrived bullshit where I try to make a spectacle of myself rather than taking a holistic look at what I really want out of life.

I should be beyond thinking what I want to do yesterday today or tomorrow. And maybe if I spent a bit of time away from the web I will find what I want. Weird that typing text is about my only expressive outlet or social connection with other people. But it is truthfully quite arbitrary. Electrons flow. It means nothing more than that. And never will.

I can't expect others to like me and for it to mean anything until I learn to like myself and have expressive outlets that do not involve the web or drinking or other ways of acting stupid.

Recycled Lyrics

Sideways, drop again
fall across the landfall
wish it would begin

think about the trip
across, and look up again

blind the sky
dream and think
what does it all mean

where it all begins
when it all will end
if it will matter that
that I am again

Why Do Moods Change Quickly? And do They Usually Have Reason?

You are what you tell yourself and you get what you want.

Not sure if it will always be that way, but for me all I have to do is tell myself to stop living pathetically when I am doing shitty at something and then willfully desire to change it...and then magically it changes :)

Like right now I still am socially inept a bit (or maybe a lot) but I have went out a few times recently and had fun. I probably drank a bit more than I should have ;) but even after drinking a bit I was turning down free drinks from the bartender, which shows that I don't have to be a jackass when I go out and drink, and that I can (at least sometimes) accept and know my limits.

I have been working out quite a bit recently. Mostly just shooting hoops and doing the elliptical machine. Yesterday I did tons of ab stuff. I was almost certain my abs (which used to be stupidly stupidly stupidly strong - in bootcamp I could do way more sit-ups than the guy in the division who became a SEAL) were sorta shot forever after a few years of being an office chair warrior. But when I did exercises I was able to do a near infinite set of sit ups on the lean back bench thingie.

The next day I am a bit sore, but not too bad really.

And I eat bunches of sea food - something I never would of thought I would do much.

And recently I have also replaced garbage oversugared yogurt drinks with carrot juice and tomato juice.

...and the post is finished on day 2...

Things I may still want to fix:

• be awake during the day more (why am I making this post wide awake after midnight)
  
• eat a bit more vegies
  
• not push people away so much
  
• For as good as I feel right now, I still think life is pretty pointless. The worst part about that is that as I become more successful I feel that life has less purpose (and generally have less faith in humanity). I am thinking about doing some traveling and soul searching away from the computer.

When I exercise a lot I feel life has purpose, but it seems that even after just one day of physical inactivity life quickly loses its purpose again. Which sorta shows that I am didn't know what I was talking about when I wrote most of this yesterday.

I think a cool project for someone more artistic than I would be to write pieces of things one day and then finish them at different points in time and see how much their worldview has changed since they started writing it, and then try to figure out the reasons for the mindshift.

.... 6 hours later ....

Am really happy again. And, of course, without reason :) Or maybe I told myself to be happy. Or maybe it was The Eraser.

First Veto

Wow. The president is going to do his first presidential veto ever, vetoing against increased funding for embryonic stem-cell research. From the WSJ

"The simple answer is he thinks murder's wrong," said White House spokesman Tony Snow. "The president is not going to get on the slippery slope of taking something living and making it dead for the purposes of scientific research."

If he doesn't believe in murder then

• why did he have no problem with it as a Texas governor?
  
• why start all the wars?
  
• why claim the existence of a neverending war?

Oh, I forgot, it is not murder if God is on Our Side.

Meeting People is Easy

Quote from the inside cover of Meeting People is Easy

If you have been rejected many times in your life, then one more rejection isn't going to make much difference. If you're rejected, don't automatically assume it's your fault. The other person may have several reasons for not doing what you are asking her to do: none of it may have anything to do with you. Perhaps the person is busy or not feeling well or genuinely not interested in spending time with you. Rejections are part of everyday life. Don't let them bother you. Keep reaching out to others. Keep reaching out to others. When you begin to receive positive responses then you are on the right track. It's all a matter of numbers. Count the positive responses and forget about the rejections.

That movie is about Radiohead becoming famous and touring themselves into emptiness (and showing how they rejected the fame and how their version of reality on a long tour was way different than that which the media painted).

Bono for Prez :)

I am Soooooooo Shallow...

I have a history of drinking way too much way too often, but so long as I am really happy before I drink that rarely happens. If you drink way too much it is easy to become very primal where core level (perhaps reptilian) thoughts control your actions. Obviously that is no good. So moderation is my friend who I should learn to hang out with more often.

So tonight I went out and was bored to tears. I only had 3 drinks total over 3 hours, deciding to be happy and reasonable and not an uber lush. My biggest problem with the town I am in as far as nightlife is that the clubs either have nobody in them or they are so packed that it is quite hard to just stand.

While I often tell myself otherwise (ie: lying to myself to justify my own stupidity and past actions), I think if I am actively engaged I am quite good at nonverbal communication. It sucks though when all you can do is stand around though. It is totally useless.

And I so have to rely on nonverbal communications to meet new people because I am self employed and meet few people AND my verbal skills are quite poor.

When programming in Basic or Pascal the teachers would look at what I did and say it was wrong or dysfunctional before testing it, yet if you used the program I created it would typically have fewer lines of code than "correct" software and still work.

I remember in high school a math teacher took points off for my work even though the test answer was correct. He wanted me to show more work than I was showing, but I tend to skip steps.

The same thing occurs with verbal communication. I assume others think about the same steps that I do and make notice of the same patterns or correlations I see, when usually people are like WTF until I try to explain the steps in my thought process. Combine that with a low self confidence level, traditionally having poor vision, and most likely a near photographic memory and it becomes easy to see how I create so many awkward silence moments when communicating, especially around people I do not yet know well.

I think that is part of why I do ok with the web. The prejudice it quite dropped and people learn you over time. It is also ok to be yourself and those who want to understand you will, whereas offline I am more prone to being misunderstood and/or growing quickly frustrated.

Recently I have been getting many blog comments on my blogs telling me to fuck off. Maybe online is starting to catch up with offline. Or maybe I have a magnetic (as in repulsive) personality.

In following up with my shallowness of this post, here is my picture on hotornot.

I am at best average, and that is even when I made my hair a crazy cool color. Doah. I also do not smile that much because I always think I look weird when I do.

It is amazing how different people can look in pictures. This girl (who has nuclear and engineering as tags and goes to school in the town where I live - if only she had internet as a tag I would have to bug her) looks like a goddess in her first pic, then pretty cute in the second, and then still cute but not really to the godess level in the third.

My Brother...

Is a bit sick right now.

I have some work I need to do, but I am slacking on it. I feel sad that he is sick, and I feel even sadder that I get so caught up in petty shit that I do not allow myself to appreciate life as much as I should. I am quite pathetic in many areas for as successful as I am in others. If only I believed in myself more.

I hope my brother gets well soon. I want to hang out with him again.

My mom is at least 10 times as strong as a person as I. She flew out and is visiting him right now.

Is This a Happy Picture?

I think it is a bit cropped, but

All My Friends Have Internet

I so need to make a tshirt that says that :)

I Don't Belong Here...or do I?

So I am at Disney right now. About to go out and about for a walk.

Yesterday I took a group van to the hotel, and in spite of 3 of us near the back of the van all going to the same place nobody really talked much until someone asked a quick question then I started blabbing and we talked a bit.

One of the girls asked where I was from and
I said central Pennsylvania
she said and ...
I said and what
she said who are you here with who do you work for
I said just me. I am a blogger.
she said can you make enough doing that
I was like yup

I just got my badge and it says "agency" on it. WTF was I thinking when I did that. I am not a schmoozer (although I do have a business partner that is a killer shmoozer but not here) and I have a hard time being interested in business beyond theoretical levels unless I have a deep passion in the topic. I have never been a fan of categorizing people, either...especially when I feel I only became successful when I defied categorization or pushed to create my own category.

Truth be told I am not a mixer really. I get really bored by people unless I really feel I know them, like them, am interested in them, and can trust them.

At business meetings with people you just met that trust thing is going to be a really limited resource...just because business is all about getting ahead, and more often than not it is by doing whatever it takes (to accumulate wealth or influence at the expense of others). So I guess meeting people under the whole pretense of business is kinda not my thing (it's no better than meeting people drunk, but while meeting them you are inebriated by capitalism).

And as much as there is the issue of boredom there is also the issue of feeling fake in myself. I am not all about making money really...I have enough to get by, so me getting deep into business stuff is just blah, like the motivation is not there.

I love music. It is what gets me on from day to day and I think I would like to be a musician because it would be really hard and I have no skill at all, and it is a land full of uncertainty.

I need to work on things that improve my self confidence in things outside of the web and my core business interests, but I have never really had more than a few friends at any given point in my life. Now I guess I have a bunch, but live near none of them.

Outside of business and / or being a drunk idiot I really have limited social contact with others (and I don't drink often anymore). When I do meet new people it usually has to be just a few people and while hanging out with another friend.

If groups get too large I feel drowned out and sit back too far and am too quite. Also many people do not get my jokes, like I usually have to follow them up with "just kidding" because I am too deadpan when I tell them.

I also am quality at creating awkward silence moments. I have yet to meet a person who does that as well as I do. It is not something I intentionally do, it just comes from my thought patterns.

I often skip a logical step in a sequence because I think in patterns that (from my experiences) must be at least sorta rare. I have done things like look at a set of stairs and at a glance said 15 or 33 and saw the exact number of them. Or I look at a waterfall and notice the support beams for the awning have pipes in them that run the water up to the waterfall. Weird shit like that. Why do I think of that? Why does it matter? I presume other people see things the same way that I do when I am soooooooooo pragmatic and over analytical.

I think part of that could be from having to interpret hidden meaning in things. Like not being able to see for a long time (literally being legally blind until half way through high school without knowing it). What is weird is that at times I am almost certain that I not only have poor vision but that I also have a photographic memory. Like on switchboards full of fuses I can just rattle off fuse ratings even if the data and numbers are pointless and without meaning. And this ability also creates awkward silences because other people say things and I pick up on the bits that do not match the numbers I know to be right even if the numbers are trivial in the grand scheme of the situation or story.

That sort of lens I realize is a good thing because it forced me to be able to get the bonus of living two lives for the price of one. Lenses that you can turn on and off are really cool as well, because they allow you to visualize life in multiple ways.

But social relationships also provide additional lenses, and I really am too isolated for it to be all too healthy. And I have had really good times before even at bad points in life...like when I was almost bankrupt and making about $10 a day I still met one of the coolest girls I have ever met. I think part of that was because I was hanging out with a fun friend, and another part was because I think I knew I was pissed off enough at the world to do whatever it took to make my own condition better. I was hungry and that opened up opportunities, not only business opportunities, but also social ones.

Disney is the land of opportunity...or mischief maybe? Off to walk around. I wish I could think of the world as being as magical as I used to when I was 6. I want that back.

But now I am just too fat and comfortable. Maybe I should move or do something else that is really disruptive.

I also feel the world deserves better out of me. I used to work much harder than I have recently and I used to have way more passion. I feel like I have hit a plateau and need to look for inspiration and meaning in life again.

Probably

a poor man
trapped in a tin can
can't understand the demands
the world has placed upon him

beyond the shadow of a doubt
there is a shadow
of another doubt

and so it continues

Nothing Was Ever Lost

Noam Chomsky on how the US never was a democracy:

That's the way the country was founded. It was founded on the principal explained by Madison in the Constitutional Convention that the primary role of the government is to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. And then the constitution was designed to sorta ensure that.

On personal motivation and balance

and Noam Chomsky on The Charlie Rose Show, talking about democratic deficit

part 2

On the need for creativity

part 2

Our own versions of humanity and human ideals are limited by our own flaws and our own sets of experiences, but it doesn't mean that we should just accept things as they are or feel powerless to change them.

I still have a lot to change to do internally to become the person I should have been many years ago, but if the whole rulebook or set framework is wrong then one should look to change it, as best they can.

So much of it comes down to controlling public perception. Why, for example, are there so many conditions for recycling. Why does the local recycling guide not accept many things that they should? Why does the recycling tips information page look like a legalspeak long set of rules when the process should be simple and easy? It is because there is more profit in discouraging people and making them not care. The more we consume the more profit there is. We can worry about the trash later, when there are business models that (hopefully) come about which are profitable on that issue.

Of course eventually they will come about and be profitable, but there is too much money tied up in exploiting current energy supplies and making people not care. Only when people notice the problem will there be enough mindshare to divert appropriate resources to that issue.

There are tons of other issues too, but why is it that we have to operate on such a reactive level if we are so advanced? Why can't there be more investment in fixing problems before they get out of control?

I find it absurd that I stood a couple feet from him and that he emailed my old roommate and autographed my roommate's copy of Manufacturing Consent.

Tubes - it's ALL Tubes

Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens - a vote against evolution

Internet started with the concept of tubes.

He has no problem spending $223 million for a bridge that services an island of 50 people and wants to put control of the web into a couple telecom monopolies with legacy business models.

Free market enterprise really smells like shit when people like Stevens have an opinion that matters. Don't get me wrong, I think everyone should be free to voice their opinions, I just don't think his should count any more than mine. Especially on issues related to the WWW.

If the voting machines work, jim crow laws don't appear, and individuals can inspire others to be non apathetic maybe that sort of scum will be removed from congress.

How can this man be considered anything but a hypocritical scumbag?

Stupid Ipod

Second time I had to reset my iPod in as many months. How annoying.

Violate the Geneva Conventions

It is pretty bad when you stack the deck and still lose. But Bush's reputation precedes him.

One does not need to join the military to realize just how slanted military courtrooms are. I was stupid enough to learn the slant the hard way. My lawyer (when I was in the military) was actually verbally reprimanded for actually trying to defend the defendants. He was getting out of the military the day after he participated in my case. He not only tried to defend me, but he and I also played word games during the joke court session :) Those courts really are a joke.

Of course the president is still hints at guilt on the locked up parties, as though the court cases have already occurred

President Bush said he would "look seriously" at the case, adding: "The ruling, as I understand it, won't cause killers to be put out on the street."

I just hope someday that Bush winds up in jail. Maybe that would lead to a resurgence in spirituality for this country.

It's Always Discouraging...

to find out that your own family members have become radicalized, and compare other groups of people to multiplying rats that should be shot on sight, without questioning weather or not there are faults to that philosophy, or if that philosophy is what is causing the multiplication of the "rats".

Maybe it is.

Saudi and Israeli studies show that most foreign fighters were not terrorists before Iraq war.

Let someone kill some of my family and see if I don't send some of that pain right back where it came from. If I did that, would I be reduced to a "rat" status? What is the difference between a rat and an exterminator? The country they come from? Or the scale of murder that is permissible and just?

Hitler was a fairly successful exterminator. Not sure why any human alive today would want to fall into that same group though (unless they fell for brainwashing false patriotic bullshit used to exploit them for votes and/or corporate profits).

Yet another reason I will never believe in any mainstream organized religious institution that teaches people to become radicalized hypocrites.

Because we are human we all have errors and are all hypocritical, but to think that you should be the judge and jury on the worthiness of living of another human you know little about is at best ignorant. It certainly is not something you should teach your children.

Where the hell is the tolerance in that? What religious book did that shot on sight just extermination philosophy come from? I would love to read that section of your Bible / Koran / etc so I could debunk it.