civilisationReview

The strategy of Corporations and governments in the long run is to get people to stop seeing the cup as half empty,  1. by downsizing the size of the cup to half so it can be perceived as completely full 2. by downsizing the thirst of the people so they view the glass as full enough 3. by getting the people to compensate for the glass being half empty by looking elsewhere for nourishment And this works by downsizing people's intelligence, aspirations, self-identity, ideas on what is ideal, etc, etc, in proportion to the downsizing of the glass, through the reduction of expectations via the provision of means to get around a half empty glass.  The hunger for profit by the few can never be reconciled with the maximal development of all the people.  Yup.  The best means supplied by capitalist and fascist governments globally to get around a problem is by getting you to not see it as one.   And how that is done is by 1.  providing you ways to get around it...

Sex cult leader Keith Raniere, has been convicted in New York of charges including racketeering, sex trafficking and child pornography. - bbc Why it's so difficult to stop a cult? Well, the western capitalist, sexual consumerist, gore-ridden 'gaming' and 'entertainment' experience, prochoice, reaction-inducing experience of 'like' buttons, emojis, shaky camera productions, shallow 'boom boom' sexually brazen 'music', amongst others, are all pretty much components of a depraved cult itself, or is required to form one isn't it.  The west closes doors to the meaningful, spirituality, religion, community, family, equality on a socioeconomic and multicultural level on a daily basis.  People still need to feel alive, to feel passion, to have meaningful aspirations, to imagine beyond themselves.  But with the narrowing of the pathways to the significant, and the promotion of the shallow to the depraved, the doors are immediately opened to cults,...

Ed: When you are pregnant, your body belongs to the child as well. The woman's ' choice' is only half as relevant or significant. In the case of triplets.... Well, you do the arithmetic. Ed: How is it that people here care more about goddamn dogs then unborn babies?!?! Lyndsay: Hmm perhaps because dogs are breathing on their own as a fully formed being in the world not inside anyones stomach? They arent just a clump of cells in someone elses bodily organ that would cease to be if anything happened to that host. Elizabeth: Dogs think and feel and communicate on some level. Kai Meiling: They also taste better Ed: You guys are missing the point. What is a dog's potential? Will it one day become a talking, voting, loving, creative, intelligent, empathetic, multicultural, philosophic, religious, insightful, wise....person? Every baby you kill in the womb has the potential for all of that. Do you toss out a seed because it has yet to bloom? In potential, a dog pales in ...

A woman has been fined for taking her horse into a McDonald's restaurant in Greater Manchester. Police said the woman, who has not been named, was in the saddle when she was initially turned away from the drive-through kiosk on Bury New Road. The woman then led the animal inside, where it "ended up doing his business on the floor", a Greater Manchester Police (GMP) spokesman said. "The incident caused distress to customers and disruption for the restaurant, and the police issued the woman with a fixed penalty notice." She added: "The health and safety of our customers and staff is our top priority, and for this reason we are unable to serve pedestrians, bicycle riders or customers on horseback through the drive-thru." - bbc Why should MacDonald’s view a horse in a drive-through as compromising ‘health and safety’ as opposed to a car.  I dare say that a horse’s ass presents less of a hazard than the exhaust pipe of a car. And anyway, I don't know wh...

I'm still in love with the printed word, be it in ink or e-ink


  ~  ed I had been an avid book-reader since i was a child, but with books tearing on me, i decided that it would be wiser for me to upgrade my views on this so that i wouldn't have to keep buying the same books over and over again - like my Sherlock Holmes, Rumpole, and Jeeves and Wooster (Rumpole has the Oxford Book of English Verse as a constant bedside companion, i have the Rumpole Omnibuses and the aforementioned:) ) I save space on books and DVDs (the latter replaced by a hard-drive and a WDTV) and replace it with music-making tools, toys, comics and records now As for the issue of book vs ebook-reader, it is a non-issue for me now. What i'm focused on is what is the best e-reader in terms of function and feature. Kindle has great marketing strategies, the Kobo has a great e-book reader - given its non-proprietary approach, and its memory card slots. As for being able to share e-books, well, unlike mysel...


An extreme artist has been performing acrobatics hundreds of metres above a canyon in central China. Eskil Ronningsbakken, who worked on the Aizhai suspension bridge in Hunan province without a safety harness, later balanced on a rope ladder hanging from a hot air balloon. - bbc “There were times when intellectual, spiritual, and creative achievement preoccupied quite some people. Now, its just 'career advancement', reproduction, grocery shopping, celeb worship and reality shows. With the devaluation of life, its no wonder that people put it at risk for 'kicks' as a last effort at feeling alive. People who like 'living on the edge' are those who don't have anything going on in the plains of the lives, if you think about it.” - ed, on facebook What we are seeing all around us is the best a child would do if pushed to be creative and intelligent but forced to remain a child.  The child can reach the maximum of its intelligent and creative potential as a ch...

Musing...... If i had kids, i'll invest in lots of books, DVDs, music, records....from the 40s to the 80s so that they can have a good upbringing.  Histories of time past from the times before The Christ or The Buddha.  Books and films on Religion of all sorts, from Satanism to Christianity.  Little House on the Prairie, The Waltons, Highway to Heaven, Sherlock Holmes, Only Fools and Horses, 40s - 70s music, Indian/Western/Arab/African classical, spiritual stuff, etc, etc, etc, is far better perspectival nutrition that the crap they produce these days. If you think about it, which you probably don't unfortunately, our genetic make-up comprises much of those genes that had 'learnt' much from our millions of years of evolution. It contains such 'knowledge' so that we can be better with age and cope better with the vagaries that come with the unpredictable tide of times. 

Or at least it is supposed to. However, this does not apply to knowledge itself as the young ...

From text messages and email to chat rooms and video games , technology has over the past few decades brought an extraordinary new arena of verbal exchange into being - and one whose controversies relate not so much to foreign infiltrations as to informality, abbreviation and self-indulgence. Hence the swelling legions of acronyms ( LOL! ), grunts of internet-inspired indifference ( meh ) and social-media-inspired techniques for dramatising the business of typing ( #knowwhatImean ).  - bbc Language Purists were dismayed that the internet slang, “LOL” was included in the dictionary.  What is a ‘Language Purist’ anyway?  Well, they are simply people whom like the way language already is, and want it to remain that way.  If there was a dictionary around, say, 1000 years ago, what would its contents be like.  Well, it would have the vocab of the elite, and the peasants, and limited by the cultural and technological state of affairs of that time.  In the p...

original image modified by ed Fizzy drinks should be heavily taxed and junk food adverts banished until after the watershed, doctors have said, in a call for action over obesity. The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, which represents nearly every doctor in the UK, said ballooning waistlines already constituted a "huge crisis". Its report said current measures were failing and called for unhealthy foods to be treated more like cigarettes. - bbc This is similar to drug sellers giving discounts to new users, and then charging them high prices upon addiction. In this context, we have the pretense of concern for our well-being being used to justify said rises. Regulate these industries so that we can have a choice between good stuff as opposed to having a choice between having or not having what we have been made to be accustomed to. Secondly, There are quite a few whom believe that the government should just stay out of it and not ‘nanny’ the people in this, amongst other respe...

Well, how is this happening.   Conspiracy theories aside, i’d say that one of the significant contributors to the degeneration of language, and hence, thought, is the young serving as a significant and vocal market force, and playing a major role in the evolution of the content of the net, with it largely being determined by the Americans whom are advanced enough in capitalism to reduce and produce people whom are nothing more than mere consumers and trend-followers. Is it any wonder that ‘awesome’ and ‘weird’ and ‘cool’ have become the verbal arbitrators of what is acceptable and what isn’t?  There is no argument, no rationale.  All we are assailed by is a barrage of OMGs and WTFs and LOLs.  Like I was saying to my companion, V (chinese girl from singapore) is that the more extensive the vocabulary, the greater the meaningful means by which we can comprehend reality.  I compared american-english to the chinese-english (for instance, called ‘singlish’, in s...

I suppose the belief that the end is nigh is due to people wishing for a world without Mondays....and feeling impotent enough to not do something about it themselves ~ ed bbc: Mayan prophecies: Life after the (non) end of the world On the other hand.....those who openly state that only idiots believe that the world will end today base their self-confidence in the fact that they can never be proven wrong. ~ ed bbc: 'Mayan day of apocalypse' arrives (the comments beneath the bbc article is worth a read...for it's priceless wit that is ;) ed

I was watching Jeeves and Wooster last night (one of my favourite shows) and there was a scene where 'Wooster' exclaims, 'Blasted!' and all the women present, including Aunt Agatha, took great exception to it (see video below - "Bertie! Kindly restrain your language!"...which can be paraphrased with, "Kindly restrain your passion/opposition").

 Now, literally, there is nothing vulgar about 'Blast' - unless, of course, it was to be expressed through one's rear end in a crowded restaurant during the main course, and within earshot of all present. But i suppose it is the expression of passion and and vigour that might at times seem vulgar to the relatively dispassionate.

  I suppose the curtailment of passion does, in a way, vasectomise and ligate the population into political and perspectival impotence, whilst rendering them objective enough to do their best to put up with a bad situation with a cool head instead of attempting to get rid ...

On the basis of reason, I refuse to subscribe to the belief and faith in the 'bi-polar' condition. It makes people think that this is an internal/mental/psychological condition as opposed to a situational/environmental one. That entrenches them in this condition which can become a self-fulfilling prophecy where one can actually expect to have mood swings instead of realising that one's situation and a failure to formulate correct strategies is the true cause of their mood swings.  For instance, when a person is in a good/objective mood, that person who also believes that s/he is ‘bi-polar’ can actually expect this ‘good mood’ status to change to a ‘bad/depressive/anxious’ mood.  This belief itself can cause it to happen as it will lead one to expect the end of a ‘good mood’ and simultaneously lead one to begin focusing on information/memories of how one felt when in a bad mood previously/physical sensations like high heart-rate/etc that eventually brings it about - hence, t...

When people ask me what sort of music I listen to, I might say, amongst others, “60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s.” “Oh! Retro.”, they might respond knowingly. “No. ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s.”, I correct them. And if they were to push it with an, “It’s the same thing isn’t it!” Then they’ve asked for it. Dictionary meanings and social meanings can be two different things. On the surface, ‘retro’ would refer to ‘the past’. There is no other value attributed to it. It is just ‘music that was produced in the past’. But when humanity fell for the religious belief that ‘we are living in modern’ times - excluding ed - this meant that quite a few words begin to mean something else as well. For instance, ‘elders’ became ‘old’. ‘Retro’ became ‘kitsch’, ‘passe’, ‘old’, and all of these words became interchangeable terms as well. That’s what happens when people are led to believe that we are living in ‘modern’ times; that we have reached the shores of enlightened times unlike the ‘medieval past’. So ...

The short answer. Yes. I’ll keep it simple. What are the factors contributing to having more information = knowing less ? 1. The human tendency to pay attention to that which interests us instead of that which doesn’t fall within our sphere of interest. 2. The influx of youngsters into the informational world to get and provide information. 3. The tendency of younger minds to be appealed to that which is immediately gratifying, trivial, sensational, publicised, etc. The discomfort of contradiction can be shunned with a single click of a mouse, and one can bathe in the self-validating mires of similitude. You don’t get wiser this way, just equally dumb. The combination of 1 to 3 mean that people tend to form self-validating enclaves of similarly interested people. Basically, the more i can interact with people of similar interests, the less i’m going to bother about people of dissimilar interests. With the world wide web, people can immediately access similarly minded people. Th...

download epub version A new comic series has hit the stands in the U.S. and the U.K. Spider-girl, starring Anya Corazon, a Latina - good, superheroes don’t have to be ‘white’ to be able to jump over the moon anymore. But I have to wonder after people who think that everyone ought to be represented whilst not wondering if this is nothing but an assimilation strategy, or amounts to the same thing. As i’ve stated before, ‘bitch’ is simply ‘man’ spelt with a b-i-t-c-h. They are simply doing the ‘man thing’ with girl things, if you get my drift. Looks like men defined what a ‘super-hero’ was supposed to be given their aggressive, egoistic, and self-absorbed tendencies - further reinforced by the socio-economic status quo - and then women were thereafter slotted into this spandex-mould. So we have equally heroic women, equally villainous women, all adopting strategies not unequal to those adopted by men since Spartacus, ‘Troy’, and given their ‘assets’ and men’s weaknesses, a touch of...

jh0nyzh3: why the f**k i was born in 1998 ? , f**k im in the wrong generation ed: I was born in '69 and loved & lived the rebellious 80s era. People came up with lots of their own styles, music, ideas. Now, its been taken over by the corporation and the only obvious sign of 'rebellion' are those jeans that ill-defies the law of gravity. Quite a let down isn't it (pun intended). However, i prefer the 70s and 60s as they were more advanced in radicalism. I like GnR, but i'm not going to fool myself into thinking that they can beat the old rockers like Led Zep, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison... (youtube) *** Whilst i do extol the virtues of the 80s era, and dismiss those who make a religion out of ‘keeping up with the times’ as ‘people who know no better for not knowing better and thus not being developed enough to appreciate better’, I am well aware of the deficiencies of the 80s as well. The 80s was basically the last era o...