blendergasket

Unless of course the dominant intelligence in the Cosmos is the Cosmos itself.

Well put. That makes perfect sense. Thank you for your input.

This is great. Thank you so much! I was curious if you had any advise on figuring out per project rates? I'm pretty new at making Wordpress sites but I make nice, handsome, responsive and very usable sites. People I have made sites for so far have wanted a single fee for the whole project.

I'm not so good at estimating the number of hours that go into a project yet. Do you have a rule of thumb aside from estimated hours * rate?

Just last night I watched a really, really great documentary on crow intelligence called "A Murder of Crows". I highly, highly recommend it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s472GjbLKQ4

This map reminds me just how split the state I live in, Washington, is. Living in Seattle it's hard to imagine we come in at the second highest category.

> Once you stop believing the NYTimes, well, what do you believe? You can believe anything a random site on the internet says. So one obvious answer, which you left out, is to actually address the legitimate grievances.

This. When people fall out of the bottom of the officially sanctioned narrative space, whether it be true, false or especially (as it probably always is) some really complex combination of the two they need to rely on their own judgement and sometimes that judgement will lead to Nazis or Reptilians or some combination thereof.

Yeah. That's interesting. I guess their ancestors shouldn't've formed empires. I imagine it'd be sort of hard to keep a racially separated empire.

Yeah, I agree with this. On the internet it's so easy to get sucked into an echo chamber and completely cloister oneself in some belief system or another. Then every other perspective is the foolish mainstream media who are only there to feed the sheeple or some agenda of the enemy. I think these echo chambers breed/cater to a sort of messianic paranoia.

I find it really interesting that at a micro level on forums like this there is the same goodness and kindness to one another. People doing each other favors, people encouraging one another, etc. I mean, I guess it makes sense. People are essentially the same no matter what weird, dark beliefs they hold, but it just always boggles my mind that, out of some fundamental goodness and bond with their fellow human, someone will go out of their way to help someone else find some article or another on why all Jews should be shot or why Anders Breivik was a hero or whathaveyou.

>The FBI used to blackmail politicians.

How do we know they don't still?

> The CIA used to frequently replace foreign leaders and > even pulled that trick on us one time.

It will be really interesting in a couple decades if we ever get to see a glimpse of what has been happening behind the scenes in Ukraine and Venezuela, not to mention throughout the Middle East.

I just feel sorry for all the people who are having to endure such violence. I can't even imagine the horror.

Semantic drift.

I find the use of this picture quite immorel.

This is not without precedent:

February 3 [1849]: The Raleigh Register runs an advertisement for women to go to the Gold Rush and get a rich husband, titled "A Chance FOR A LADY." Other efforts to encourage women to go to California include Mrs. Eliza Farnham of New York's attempt to organize a ship of intelligent women over the age of 25 to sail to San Francisco to meet miners. Editors in the east praised her efforts, but the plan failed.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/goldrush/timeline/

There was one that succeeded that I read about but I don't remember the details and don't have the time to look it up. It was either in The Barbary Coast or Rebecca Solnit's book about Muybridge.

Seriously. I just spent a good deal of time roaming around Churchill on Google Street View and it seems utterly desolate. Wikipedia says there are 813 people. One of them's blowing this app up. Probably not so private for that person.

I'm still running my T-Mobile G2 (HTC Desire) which I got in 2010. It's starting to get a little old and act a little odd sometimes but I hope to keep it for a year or two more.

Buckminster Fuller style domes sound like a good bet.

What's really interesting to me is that it seems like some very, very powerful and well-connected player, who either has access to the communication networks or people at the top of the Turkish totem pole is trying to use social media to destabilize/overthrow a government.

I don't know much about what's going on in Turkey and the corruption that's being exposed is definitely hugely damning, but I'm curious if there is any credible idea as to who is behind all this leaking? It definitely isn't a group of your average concerned citizens.

Why is the lady in the video on this page reporting this from Russia even though she said they got the docs from Snowden before he went to Russia? Are ALL their pundits in Russia for the Olympics?

As an urbanite myself I find this quite endearing.

"You'll be able to watch your videos for 5 hours until they are deleted forever."

Fixed that for you:

"We'll be able to watch your videos for 5 hours until they are deleted forever."

I'd be really interested in scientific information about this.

I have been practicing Qigong for a little more than a year and a half and I can absolutely say that it is the best thing that has ever happened to me. It feels like it's tapping right into what it seems you're talking about. It's amazing, the power of the body (which, in a dualistic culture like I've grown up in may be an overly reductive word).

I may be mistaken or we may be both using different myths to justify our food based belief systems but I was under the assumption that at least the larger pre-Columbian societies were done in by European diseases.

At least some pre-Columbian societies nixtamalized their corn (think hominy and masa harina), which unlocks many nutrients, greatly improving its nutritional value and making it a much better staple than non-nixtamalized corn.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization

This will lead to a blossoming of linguistic creativity. People are going to grow a new sexual slang that evolves arms race pace in order to get around this.

If this happens a person will need to be able to trace the evolution of the slang/code words for whatever they're looking into in order to trace a topic back throughout its history.

All this happens now in a lot of ways and in a lot of different subjects, but I think it's going to become much more important.

I think "The Kingdom of God is Within You" by Tolstoy was the most life changing book I read this year.

It made me start thinking about the idea of sin, which I haven't given much thought about before since I was not raised as a Christian and do not identify myself as one. But sin is such a powerful concept for understanding my own weakness and shortcomings and the evils that come about when I let them control my life.

It is also a very powerful message against the corruption of Church and State and the necessity of peaceful rebellion against these corruptions if they do not allow the living of a Christian life.

I was given anti-depressants and ADD medication when I was in college. I went to a cognitive psychologist who gave me a barrage of tests and told me I was off the charts ADD and had really bad anxiety and depression. I was definitely anxious and at times I can get pretty down. I turned in less homework than anyone in my whole high school and generally didn't care about most things people wanted me to (I did pretty well in community college and university though).

The psychologist didn't want to even start treatment til the meds kicked in so I, being naive and trusting, said OK, went to the croaker he recommended I go to and started taking them.

The anxiety went away as did the depression. So did any semblance of self-control I had. I can definitely see how someone could fly off the handle on these things kill a bunch of people if s/he had even the remotest inclination to do so beforehand. I started dressing crazy. I started basically talking at people, trying to blow their minds and confuse them and play with them. I lost any desire to really connect with anybody, any empathy or sympathy. My ability to introspect totally disappeared so I was unable to see what was happening to me. Maybe the idea was that depression or anxiety is related to overthinking/over-introspection or something like. Maybe I had an anomalous experience but I'm pretty sure if I continued with them I'd be in prison or suffering in some other way for the unanalyzed extremes I let myself get to.

I have other friends who have taken them or are still on them and I see/saw the same thing with them, a complete inability to self-judge causing them to make the same mistakes over and over and over and a tendency towards unfulfilling behavior. The pill they take to be happy hijacks the ability to ever create the circumstances to be happy without it.

I was unable to see what had happened to me when I was on them. I had to be told by someone who I hadn't seen in a long time how much I'd changed. It was a person I deeply respected. She told me in no uncertain terms that I wasn't the same person I had been and that I had changed for the worse. I finally tried looking inward and I realized she was right. Then I had to deal with the hallucinations and electric shock sensations of withdrawal but I'm glad I did

I may not be happy all the time, or even most of the time. I may be full of irrational fears but I believe I am becoming less so.

Meditation and Qigong help me.

He's a martyred saint for a new ideology that's just being born.

May you live in interesting times.

I think the tension between centralized panopticon infrastructure run/controlled by a power system that's trying to maintain control and the long-tailization, balkanization and echo-chamberization of the ideas that get spread across it will be a defining factor in the chaotic world we're moving into.

Entrapment seems to be a common tactic. The details of most of the arrests of would-be terrorists that they catch in the US are clear cases of entrapment. The FBI/NYPD/some paid informant finds some antisocial/inept guy who's floundering in his life and try to radicalize him and then give him a plan and tools to carry out some terrorist act.

Here's one case, but there are many: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/26/taliban-sympathi...

Pay attention to the details next time you read about a foiled terror plot in the US. A couple of them seem to have been legit but most follow the pattern.

[Edit] I became curious about what happened to this guy so I Googled him and found this: http://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2013/04/26/alleged-taliban-sy... looks like they threw the book at him and sent him to prison for 8 years for having fired a gun at a firing range. [/Edit]

May you live in interesting times.

I'm not sure if its corruption/venality or if its the fact that he has a wife and kids that keep him from going up against those who seem to hold the true power but one way or another it's deeply disappointing.