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various ramblings  (I'm thinking of Facebook) Happy Birthday the LiveJournal Way Glennn This is appropriate for a number of reasons. About two or three years ago I informally wrote off my "best friend", a con man and pot-dealer, at least formerly. That was how I met him, for sure. Then there was his big friend Nathan X__. Each accused the other of being a con man. [This changed before posting, by the way.] The last is Sean, a kid to me. You meet people, you lose people--and shortly after that he called, partly to make personal contact again. I don't actually understand people I think. What do you do when you intrinsically define something as impossible--there are few words for it, they denote "evil" and there is generally a punishment for talking about whatever it is...and it happens? I mean WHAT DO YOU DO? You can't even describe it. There is no history of it or it's distorted. Oddly enough the answer is this--you force it into a pre-existent category and forcibly ignore even glaring differences between well, what it's supposed to be and what it is. This is the art of discrimination at its finest and most transparent, every spasm of difficulty laid bare. Me First of all, remember that it's possible although not likely that there has been no such upswing. The media are solely interested in what catches the most attention. This means it invites outrage, for instance. The media delight in meddling in international politics up to and including wars and even disclosing planned battles and incursions, with the battle published by English and American newspapers during World War II and BEFORE IT HAPPENED. They also delight in trumpeting their right to cover anything at any time, up to and including Top Secret (and higher) classified documents. The meaning of Top Secret (+) is that the document(s) concerned are about matters crucial to the safety of the United States. Given an inability to cover that, the media particularly in the United States has paid close attention to all crime and attempted to publicize it and even make heroes of criminals. Secondly, note the asinine proclamation that "In the age of the Internet everyone gets their fifteen minutes of fame" and recall how desperately most people want fame. Thirdly, there has been more and more of a desperate swing toward believing in an Apocalypse. This is in a nation that not long ago delighted in its pre-eminence among all nations in all ages because of its vaunted prowess in all things, especially weapons. We have a war-based economy, and when war dwindles our economy suffers. Bear in mind that both the Kaiser and Hitler were allies and we sold them steel and military supplies before being forced to war, although the themes of both were contrary to the supposed themes of the U.S.. Primarily these themes are freedom and equality, by the way. What are the most popular themes in modern movies--revenge, violence and possibly sex? Bear in mind that sex is the only one of the three to be particularly regulated. How much attention is paid to the criminals involved? A great deal. They are even asked for autobiographies and interviews. Some obviously run social structures which are illegal. One of the most fascinating things I have seen, which I have seen no record of before, was the coverage of North Korea apparently with an intent on the part of the media to cause war. This is terrorism*. You simply don't ridicule a head of state of a country which is more than technically hostile. However, obviously the media don't and can't understand it, and any attempt to control them could not be through a court of law. I would say that any such coverage which obviously results in acts of violence should be adjudicated in a military court and dealt with appropriately, probably in one of the camps outside the United States. To risk the welfare of the world (a nuclear, biological, chemical or more likely all three combined war with increasing scope, violence and apparent cause) should be treated as attempted mass murder. To falsely accuse is libel and should be treated as such. And to attempt to penetrate secure American operations is clearly an act of terrorism. I do have one idea for treating this and other crimes and for using those devoted to violence and war (it stems from the writings of Mack Reynolds) but I'll leave that for later. *Actually, I should have added that they might be simple idiots, and perhaps this should introduce a distinct category: domestic terrorist-idiots. I suspect there are two kinds of diaries. One is the immanent and the other the imminent, to misquote an old philosophers' joke. One concerns the "verifiable", the here and now. The other is concerned with ideas and patterns. An interesting pattern to note is that our greatest artists have mainly been those who mismanaged the "real"--the imminent--in the search for the immanent. This presumably means the writer of that sort of diary is concerned solely with that which is immediately present and incapable--whether by reason of congenital or occasional cause--of even considering that which is hypothetical at best. Now consider our politicians and would-be definers of right and reason. N Current mood: realistic. But if you discuss the whole bit in terms of language it's a bit recursive. You can't get away from intrinsic errors http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Edward+Sc You're all going to tell me I'm an insane highbrow again if you even read this. So first of all this http://news.yahoo.com/north-korea-rejec The very first thing to note is that the Chinese are the culture which has the longest tradition of politics, warfare and deception of which we know. The grammar on that is in fact correct although it sounds clumsy. We don't know how long ago The Art of War was written. '"The calculus in China is changing to the point where it is starting to ask the question: Is North Korea more of a liability than a benefit?" said Paul Haenle, former China Director on the U.S. National Security Council and White House representative to the Six Party Talks.' The very first concern of the Asian in government is the preservation of "face". Being convicted of impropriety still often results in suicide. To convict an asian nation of something leading to loss of face could well itself alone lead to war. '"The United States of America and our allies are prepared to deal with any threat and any reality that occurs in the world," U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said ahead of his visit to Afghanistan on Friday. "We are aware of what's going on. We have partnerships in that part of the world that are important."' That's relatively asinine. Perhaps the best example of our complete ineptitude at understanding the asian mentality (or that of any other culture that varies from White Anglo-Saxon [note that we are most prejudiced against our own indigenous culture and then against the culture(s) that we enslaved]). Our prime value is the preservation of current values and means of stating them. Another way of saying that is that the U.S. culture carefully avoids the capability of adaptation and in fact has as a prime good an enforced lack of change in most areas of life (after all, we define justice as following or at most establishing precedent and carefully base new precedents as far as possible on the old). '"We always believe that sanctions are not the end of Security Council actions, nor are sanctions the fundamental way to resolve the relevant issues," Yang said, urging all sides to exercise calm and restraint.' One of the implications of that is that Yang sees this as an attempt on the part of the U.S. to find another place to engage its armed forces, which are in fact the only active part of our economy. We are a war-based economy and have been since at least the beginning of World War II. As a final note, the United States was the one who began the conflict with North Korea because it was encouraging Russia initially in an attempted takeover of those lands. North Korea has no reason at all to trust us and a great deal to distrust, especially because of our track record of trying to bring "the American way"--enforcing it, that is, since that's how military forces work--to the entire world. Well, almost a final note. I wouldn't have gotten disabled veteran status if the powers of the United States hadn't decided that they didn't want to deal with my increasing revelations of happenings in Vietnam, which were the same things that Bush reclassified toward the end of his term. I'm mostly avoiding dealing with classified information I encountered because of my term in the service, because it seems fair--and because there is nothing save memory to back it. Bear in mind that I've left a lot out. I have spent at least twelve hours on the phone what with waiting in queues and dealing with tech support and middle management. I have had a bad problem understanding people at times; our phones [landline] aren't the best, and I do wear hearing aids; more awkward than that, my hearing loss isn't even, I still catch rather high frequencies better than a lot of others. Add to that generic heavy accents from various places. I had a third level contact is one of the things that I left out. She may still be the one involved with my "case"--Susan Stamp, and mentioning the name is hardly an impropriety on my part. I can even sympathize at this point. I have verified that the problem has been escalated to level three, and from past experience that means it will get solved. Even getting that assurance took an hour today. The only advice I can give is persistence. When buying our Dell products we now agree not to take part in any class action. Most small claims courts won't allow lawyers. Your bank can't help unless it's a clear case of fraud (arguable). Although Better Business Bureau and the Attorney General's offices can be alerted that means no relief for you but for others. Persistence bothers them. "If you don't hear from someone by Tuesday Mr. Charles, I'd advise you to call them." http://www.cbsnews.com/2300-504083_ Those bad Amish dudes that secretively cut off beards and hair why they are getting their just dues, up to fifteen years in prison. .... I hope they never catch me doing something like flipping someone off, who knows what the penalty might be. I'm going to precede the current story about an Alienware Aurora R4 computer with a story about this one, an Optiplex 620. This one is a heavy duty desktop PC and that's it. It's not heavy-duty gaming material, which is the reason for its semi-replacement. That answers an obvious question. It's remained in use and it's remained reliable since an initial problem. That was that it was shocking. Literally. There were sparks that would fly. I would say evidently it's a problem with a grounded power supply in that model at that date since the problem was known. It was bad enough that it burned out a set of (cheap) headphones and could give a quite noticeable shock. Dell's position from start to finish on that was of concern and speedy resolution of the problem. The 620 cost less than a thousand dollars. The Alienware computer cost something like three thousand dollars by itself. From the first day there was a problem with booting, in that it kept going into CHKDSK which is simply not the way it's supposed to go. There were problems with the sound (the sound is on the mainboard in the configuration that I bought because of a dual video card). Mind you that the kinds of programs I added were rather commonplace housekeeping and backup programs. However, I'm getting ahead of myself on that one. The problem worsened and as I recall it actually got to the point at that time that the computer wouldn't boot. I was relatively gracious about it. I had accepted a computer that had had a seriously damaged container. I'd neglected to call when it wouldn't successfully perform first boot (I was calm and tried it three times; and no, there was no code). I didn't panic and oddly enough that was a mistake. Mind you, that was exactly what they would have told me to do anyway. And then it wouldn't boot, so they sent a technician to my house and replaced the motherboard and hard drives. And then it wouldn't boot, so he told me to call tech support. After trying various things with boot setup, he got it to work (I had a flash drive he used to transfer things from this computer to the Alienware computer, said things being driver downloads. That was a couple of weeks ago. Well, call it three. The computer arrived December 12th (2012) that first problem was resolved approx 2/1/2013 and... That is the first part of the story. I'm omitting a lot because there is probably a lot of rage remaining from the whole affair. |
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