I pity the fool who think that the U.S. Congress has an easy decision to make concerning cutting constituents’ government jobs or by extension, the local mom-and-pop businesses that depend on government employees shopping locally.
Whatever works, right?
Okay, it’s your turn to write an introductory sentence, then point out a link, quoting part of the original post and finally wrap up with a quick observation:
Tom Foremski at ZDNet says, “And that’s how a profit of 5.5 billion Euros turns into just 45 million Euros that is taxable in Dublin.”
It’s time we took a stand. If the EU won’t force Ireland to raise its corporate tax rates, we Americans aren’t going to sit back and watch our approved intellectual property earn us nary a dime.
We’re announcing today that the invasion of north Africa is part of a larger campaign to capture and assimilate all of Europe for U.S. treasury relief.
Well, that is, of course, all the parts that are profitable – Greece, Portugal, the unprofitable portions of Ireland, etc., we’ll gladly leave to their clueless leaders.
Before we storm the sandy shores of Rossbeigh Beach, we’ll sweep across Bermuda, triangles and all, planting the flag of the United States of America and declaring official territory of the red, white and blue.
Of course, we’ll call this Operation “Royal Wedding Crashers,” so you can guess the date of our invasion freeing the undertaxed people of Bermuda and Ireland.
Except for high inflation, I wonder, are we reliving the Jimmy Carter presidential years?
I want some Billy beer!
The Committee says we need to tell you what the future looks like so you won’t be surprised when you find yourself fulfilling the prophetic predictions that determine how our lives will work out.
First of all, a nod to the band who turned my new at&t user agreement into a folk-metal song in the style of Korpiklaani/Fferyllt singing. Leave it to youth to put their creativity to good business use!
I’m sure at&t doesn’t want to get mixed up with the CapitalOne Visigoth ad campaign, though, so I don’t expect royalty checks to come flying in from the communications behemoth very soon.
Anyway, in 14,282 days, after we’ve sent on our portion of the the intergalactic message that will pass through this part of the universe, we’ll have accomplished a mission that our species was assigned thousands of years ago when we were mere slaves for an advanced extraterrestrial civilisation that passed by our planet during their version of a weekend picnic getaway.
Of course, their days are not like our days so their weekend lasted a few years, the visitors enjoying their stay here while they determined how malleable we really are in comparison to others’ forms of socialised beings.
A quaint little species we were back then, scattered across the globe, a few remnants of our competing ancestral branches hidden in pockets of isolation.
They considered farming us like cattle but we became a rowdy bunch in captivity, subject to emotional outbursts that they could control only by killing, which was counterintuitive to their sense of protecting investment, product, profit and way of life, the four pillars of their culture back home.
They moved us to uninhabited parts of the planet, hoping our isolated, strange surroundings would serve as a virtual prison or enclosure that we would be unaware of and thus more willing to serve their purpose of training a few of us to carry on the idea of developing Earth into a superbrain.
If their experiment worked, we would be part of a galaxywide communications network in thousands of years, forwarding one message at least a million years old.
The Committee has many goals and they don’t want me to feel like my goal is the only important one.
However, they understand that if my teaching is correct and I am truly part of this group that has passed a message from one person to another within a loose network, then it won’t hurt to devote part of our species’ limited resources toward turning Earth into a relay station.
After all, the Book of the Future and our programmers’ supercomputer output agree that, in 1,000 years, such a goal is not only feasible but very likely a key contributor to extending the current supercivilisation forward.
Giving seven billion people one or two megagoals is good for morale.
At the same time, we have to give them subcultural goals that keep those inside the edge of every subculture the comfortable belief they are correct in their simplified view of life while those on the edge who are in charge of communicating across subcultures can maintain a semblance of peace while handling the barter exchange that our species has come to depend upon, knowing that life is far from simple.
I want to throw my opinion into arenas in which I don’t have an investment because somehow I think that being in charge means I have to have an opinion about everything.
The Committee tells me not to worry. Long before I came along, lines of communication were established that translate my general edicts into social messages that individuals believe came from the person in charge of the Committee, sometimes consciously but usually at a level of thinking that is not understood.
So, although I want to tell my national government that it’s okay to force a government shutdown in order to stop people in their tracks and force them to consider the harsh reality that expenditures are exceeding revenue by a margin that has to be changed, either by major reallocation of resources away from departmental budgets that are not generating exponential tax revenue growth or by eliminating popular social services that will trigger a change in people’s spending habits because they’ll now have to save for their own health/elderly care, the Committee members claim they have those messages already taken care of.
It started with making sure all legislative members were independently wealthy and thus unaffected by reelection politics.
This was accomplished by creating a continuity – the same fund sources pay for legislative positions, ensuring a person voted into a particular seat, representing a certain district, has the essentially the same agenda as the previous person and the person to follow.
That is, to cut the check, business as usual.
If corporations that run the world do not want to support charities or invest R&D resources for sustainable living, then governments, which, again, are just a specialised form of business, won’t, either.
Just like parents who are starting to push special needs students out of their children’s classrooms when the need of the one is taking away too many resources from the needs of the many.
It is not a fair world, I am learning in 2011.
The only way to protect the needs of your friends and family is to make wise business decisions in everything you do.
If people in a group can find no reason to support the weak among them, they will find a way to remove the weak from the group.
A harsh message, to be sure, but one that our mass media seems to project the loudest right now, as the balance of global power shifts.
Making significant sacrifices as if we’re at war.
At war with old ways of thinking, as usual.
The more things change…
If your friends and family can’t compete in the global marketplace, are they worth keeping?
Look at your social media connections and see if that’s not the message you’ve been convinced to help spread.
Cut and paste the past to suit your future!
In this alternate universe of a blog, Oliver North is a major arms dealer, busily negotiating the final deal for supplying citizens who want to create a new political entity within the borders of Libya.
A political entity devoted to freedom of expression.
Free from suppression and oppression.
Free of gender-based denigration.
North is convincing female leaders to feel as emboldened and empowered as their male equivalents.
He is telling them that the U.S. Supreme Court will rule in favour of the women who feel discriminated in their retail jobs.
He coordinates with NATO and UN commanders in laying down lines of fire, offering food and safety to citizens in the warzone if they give up allegiance to a dying regime.
Meanwhile, other alliances are figuring out if they can erase the old political boundaries in order to create a larger, unified land mass dedicated to their cause.
Would you sacrifice your life in the duty of a nuclear plant samurai, your body ravaged by the quiet-but-beastly fire of radiation like an invisible Godzilla you cannot see but will attempt to vanquish for the sake of your people?
If you fight for a cause that history does not favour, to whom are you a hero?
If weapons suppliers like the looks of a skirmish that won’t end anytime soon, will you and your family keep on dying to maintain a warring stalemate?
How will corporations keep their employees motivated in the future?
Should every product have a dual use (if not more uses)?
A hatchet is also a hammer.
A bullet or a missile is just a projectile.
More than a deterrent, how do you put weapons to use in times of [relative] peace?
Western diets may be unhealthy but they make a lot of people wealthy.
Remove the wealth or the diet, what does the resulting vacuum suck into its place?
Guns, butter, diamonds…
Nature and nurture lead us to our choices.
Know your enemy.
Better yet, know your enema, ’cause when war is on your doorstep, some of you are gonna pucker up and get constipated. ;P
Friends don’t let friends disappear. The power of the dark side is everywhere.
Science is important only when freedom is a right, not a privilege.
Sadness and humour are the familiar bedfellows of celebrity and loneliness. Anyone for a foursome?
Watching others find ways to live, and watching myself reach out to the world through the cold, unloving connections of bits and bytes, I wonder…
While keeping the research of the particles of life moving forward, just so we can reach a milestone 14,284 days from now…
I wonder.
The old ways are still valid comparison points, I tell myself.
Political boundaries were meaningful at some point in time.
Every supercivilisation concedes old economies of scale to the previous generation.
I wonder why parents force so many structured activities on their children when children will become better adults if given time to explore subjects their parents don’t care to know about or simply don’t know exist.
How much of a general education is good for one person?
In sixth grade, I’ve said here at least once, I learned about the Soviet Union making students choose the direction their education would take at around age 10 or 11 (my same age at the time), and about Germany giving students the Gymnasium route, if they chose, after their primary school years were completed.
In secondary school, I could choose a vocational/technical program, a college preparatory program or a general education program for my high school diploma.
Specialisation divided me from my primary school classmates at age 15.
My observations about life in general began to take a new direction at that age, despite my desire to learn about all ways of life.
I lost track of the thought patterns of students outside the college preparatory track.
Yet, I still kept trying to apply my theories about general personality types to a smaller population.
Thus, at university, my theories were destroyed.
Was it inevitable? For me, obviously, yes.
Snobbishness did not equate to applied intelligence as it had amongst my friends in secondary school.
People with a so-called redneck personality were just as likely to pursue a career in engineering or science as a person who had never seen a can of PBR beer.
And in the streets of downtown Atlanta, those who never completed a formal education were just as likely to drink high-shelf liquor and drive expensive cars as those who had PhDs and invented the Next Big Thing.
The Internet, a general means of access to self-education, did not exist in my youth. Television, films, books, magazines, newspapers and contact with other people were the limited means to teach oneself.
I couldn’t instantly tweet with a person on the other side of the globe but I could exchange letters with an international penpal.
Ham radio gave some semblance of tweeting/texting. Both provide no clear understanding of body language (but voice-based ham radio communication did provide intonation (Morse code was the tweeting/texting of its day, of course)).
But one body is still one body, subject to circadian, natural wake/sleep cycles. Despite external devices and integrated prosthetic body part advancement, we chiefly depend on the speed of our central nervous system to process stimuli.
We may have speeded up the ability to herd our species but we are still flesh-and-blood states of energy.
Enlightened youth want more and they want it now, while older people want to keep their well-established lifestyles.
In general.
I enjoy watching the misdisuninformation cycles that those with something to sell/tell start by dropping a pebble, the concentric circles distorting and being distorted by all the competing messages vying to become stimuli to individuals and groups.
I have nothing to sell or tell.
I want to live a life that is amenable, even if “amenable” is a word I have to look up its meaning to determine if I’ve used its definition in the right context here.
So far, I’ve enjoyed the luxury of sharing my observations freely, keeping myself from succumbing to the temptation of luxury.
As we become more fully aware that consciousness is a deception that can fool us into a self-destructive supercivilisation, we will give more and more thought to the fact our bodies are made of competing subsystems working for the greater good of the body.
Nurture creative criticism in our children so they will understand friendly competition is the route to a world of competing subcultures working for the greater good of the body.
Cutting off negative pathways is painful but so is removing a gangrenous body part for the sake of the body.
There is no ultimate solution. Life goes on.
We adjust to the changing times or we don’t – either response is acceptable.
Give room for the voices to be heard – the best solution in the moment often comes from a place we won’t know existed because a parent gave a child time for self-education outside the prescripted norm.
The size of the pathway or nervous system pipeline is key to understanding how to read the health of a subculture. Overcrowd the pathway or overclock the pipeline speed and you create side effects that quickly turn into pathological terminators.
Are any of these theories universally valid or have I created a thought set that applies to a limited population?
From Ralph Nader’s suggestion for eliminating athletic scholarships to those who consider initiating an unprovoked attack on Libya is full cause for impeachment proceedings, the 1,000-year view will give you what you want, as always.
Herding cattle or herding our species, the Committee takes nothing personal.
Should the organisation of a government (which, remember, is little more than another form of business) be heavily weighted toward one branch or another?
Some of the next few decisions are not easy for me to make because they do affect me personally.
Leadership can be fun but changing the lives of others drastically against their wishes is not the part I consider to be fun.
Just like they told me, “We wish a third party candidate would win control to prove the system is greater than ideology.”
Seven billion views that differ except for the fact they belong to beings that all lived, no matter how their definition of normality can or can’t compare…
A personal journey I asked for and a personal journey I got, where I often don’t get what I wish for but always get what I basically need…
Tree leaves grow bigger every day as the ambient temperature generally increases.
Waves of denser air push water droplets to the ground gravitationally, flooding big creases and low-lying areas in the landscape.
14,286 days – where does the time go?
Oh well, just stay focused on saving the species and/or the ecosystem to which it belongs.
Having grown up in one dominant subculture and used to responding to the habits of those within that subculture is a curious phenomenon to observe while knowing that subculture nor any other is the best one for nurturing children.
Yet, it shares features with other successful childrearing subcultures that are worth preserving.
Features that are shared across species and with all living things, too.
Not to forget its relationship to states of energy.
Will we see our planet is a relay beacon before it’s too late?
I used to ask about how we keep theists, atheists, extraterrestrialists and everyone else happy in their beliefs while putting them to work on a big project that is neutral about human-based belief systems.
Then they put me in charge of the Committee so I would set aside conjecture and get busy with the task the Committee members saw was the most important of all the tasks assigned to us.
It’s really up to me how much I want to get involved in the local/regional a/political activities of my species now that I know how much/little those activities in/directly impact the task at hand.
The simple fact is the easiest to explain – every individual must be given a feeling of being involved in its life, which can include the feelings of being in control or out of control of one’s life.
We can force people’s beliefs in one direction or another or we can lead by example.
Some subcultures use thought police and some use peer pressure.
Some celebrate every ability to excel, regardless of gender, and some separate skill/talent development by gender.
I am 100% a member of my species, at least as much as we understand the composition that states of energy constitute.
I defend all our actions as the ways in which we define living, regardless of how little I can justify what many of us do.
In 2011, I am learning to identify the worldview that I built to justify my actions on a daily basis as well as learning that a universal view can include an absence of not only my species but life as we know it on this planet (it can also include a reconfiguration of what I think is a universe).
In 1,000 years, how will this 1-acre tract of land I call my own have changed?
It is no longer a part of undeveloped country or land on the edge of farm fields. It is an established portion of the suburbanised landscape, evidence of increased population density by my species.
We build and rebuild and rebuild urban population centers, finding many ways to justify their existence – increased efficiency, the interconnected sets of idea generation, glorious architecture, etc.
We hypnotise and mesmerise ourselves with our cleverness.
As we attempt to find the next superbrain construction means that is sustainable, many parts (e.g., urban centers) have failed and more parts will fail.
Do we step out of this moment and into the future by admitting nothing is permanent and our structures should be put together on the assumption we’ll need to take them apart and recycle the components for the next round of temporary construction?
How can we convince all seven billion of us that life is sustainable engineering?
If my regional government, the state of Alabama, is too backward to recognise the need to set aside undeveloped land for the future of its citizens, should I care if its existence is temporary, and its leaders, no matter how filled with self-importance they may be while they pursue lucrative business relationships in their brief lifetimes, are quickly forgotten and their fortunes quickly dissolved because of their short-sightedness?
Whether we came from the cosmos, lightning striking ocean goo, or melding volcanic spew, we are here together.
Together, we make a difference.
The power of suggestion is a tool few use wisely.
That’s why I’m returning to my task of turning the planet into a relay beacon, letting the Committee, the programmers/scientists on retainer and other members of my team keep our species and our daily lives running on automatic, repeating cycles that intersect spirals they don’t remember seeing generations ago.
If I don’t keep us on schedule, who will?
If the FCC and regulators won’t put the consumer’s interest in the forefront of the at&t/T-mobile profit-making business megamerger, who will?
At least these times are entertaining, if nothing else.
Reminder: April 1st is National Male Pattern Baldness Awareness Day, which kicks off the 3-day telethon to raise money to continue spreading the awareness in hopes that a cure will not be necessary once Female Pattern Baldness Awareness Day is universally accepted.
Politicians fulfilled their promise and posted legislation five minutes before they voted and approved new rules that classify investigative journalism, or any activity that resembles such, as a federal crime under the Stalking, Terrorism, Usury, Peering, Investigation and Dependency, or STUPID Act.
Paparazzi were rounded up by the thousands and crammed together in tiny Gitmo Bay cells. Celebrities cheered, not realising how much free advertising they just gave up in exchange for privacy.
TMZ cried foul. The whole staff was arrested on grounds that protesting the potential of getting arrested is suspicion of violating the STUPID Act.
Grocery store magazine shelves were declared illegal and destroyed.
Students with webcams and mobile phones, with or without builtin camera, were placed under house arrest for violating both the stalking and dependency clauses of the STUPID Act.
Crowds gathered outside jails to celebrate the arrest and immediate conviction of bankers under the usury clause of the STUPID Act.
Lobbyists, PAC owners and payday loaners have retained all available lawyers not busy representing parents, children, mobile phone carriers, bullies, astronomers, PIs, police detectives, CSI employees, television executives, PC software company employees, scientists and quality control inspectors.
Meanwhile, Qaddafi has put the belongings of the Lockerbie Bomber for sale on the Terrorism Hero auction site to raise money to protect his shrinking empire.
Amenandjihad kept silent one more day, waiting for his spy network to identify future denizens to serve as important peons supporting the new United States of Arabia that will incorporate itself as the latest embodiment of the Ottoman Empire, hoping to rival the EU and the USA for a domestic market that serves the networked BRIC empire.
Political pundits are taking bets that after a female takes office in 2012 whether the former ruler will offer to serve as prime minister of the new USA.
The Committee set up a 3D chess set to commemorate the anniversary of the creation of the character of Spock on Star Trek.
DNA scientists were able to prove the genetic relationship between Michael Schumacher and the Busch brothers.
Steve Martin and Joan Rivers announced they secretly married at the funeral for Elizabeth Taylor, setting a new standard in Hollywood entertainment. We’d post exclusive video of the wedding but officially say we know nothing about its existence due to our patriotism and dedication to obeying the STUPID Act.
treetrunkdings 