THE ULTIMATE APOCALYPSE

Recent news article on Australian "micro-nations"

2010-05-23T22:04:00.004+10:00

Prince Paul denies he pays his rates - he merely offers a "grant" to support art in the community.

http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/World-News/Australia-Despite-many-Wanting-To-Do-Away-With-Monarchy-Some-Aussies-Starting-Micro-Nations/Article/201005415636741

It makes them sound like deluded fools.

The entire article is fluff. It doesn't get to the nitty gritty about taxes/laws/resources/etc that I particularly would want to know about.

The Prinicipality of Hutt River posted their tax return on their website. The stated taxable income is $0. They are declared "non-residents" for tax purposes. Which means essentially they get taxed at the highest rate.

http://www.principality-hutt-river.com/Principality%20Downloads/Copy%20of%20HRHPL_ATO.pdf

It also says this on the ATO's website:

The Australian Government does not legally or otherwise recognise the so-called ‘Hutt River Province’.

http://www.ato.gov.au/atp/content.asp?doc=/content/62019.htm

So.... I don't get how this works. Is it just some kind of ploy? From what I have heard, there appears to be no practical benefit in micro-nations.

Nano sensors to track objects

2010-02-11T11:23:00.002+10:00

New CSIRO nanotechnology will let you ask a computer to find lost objects

TEARING your hair out looking for that elusive missing stapler at work may soon be a thing of the past.

CSIRO researchers are developing tiny sensors to help keep track of objects from coffee cups to pens that have a habit of disappearing from office workers' desks.

The answer lies in the use of microscopic nano-technology embedded in each item.

The nano particles emit low-level radio waves that communicate over a wireless computer network linked to a central database, which keeps track of the object's location.

Can't find that AWOL stapler? Type "where is my stapler" into a drop-down tab on the computer and wait for the answer.

University students Blake Newman and David Kooymans spent their summer holidays working on the system, dubbed FLECK Nano, as part of the CSIRO vacation scholarship scheme.

CSIRO ICT Centre spokesman Philip Valencia said the nano system was a miniature version of the highly successful FLECK sensor nodes that independently record and report environmental conditions in the outdoors.

He said bringing the system inside meant factors such as temperature and power use could be monitored at a micro level, allowing small objects to be tracked unobtrusively.

Article: http://www.news.com.au/technology/new-csiro-nanotechnology-will-let-you-ask-a-computer-to-find-lost-objects/story-e6frfro0-1225829082705

Countdown to the singularity

2009-10-16T12:53:00.004+10:00

This is a singularity tracker from http://www.singularitytracker.com/ that has a timer which counts down the years, days, hours, minutes and seconds to the technological singularity (based on the estimates of Ray Kurzweil that the singularity will occur in 2045).

As of the time I made this post:

The singularity will occur in 35 Years 77 Days 14 Hours 5 Minutes 43 .4 Seconds.*

Moore's law predicts that a processor currently has about 1172555902 transistor features.

*Actual date of singularity subject to change without notice.

"Traded like cattle"

2009-10-08T10:38:00.001+10:00

Modern Debt Slavery

Slavery is a form of forced labor in which people are considered to be, or treated as, the property of others. Slaves are held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and are deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to receive compensation (such as wages). Evidence of slavery predates written records, and has existed to varying extents, forms and periods in almost all cultures and continents. In societies today, slavery exists as a legal institution or socio-economic system where people are no longer people, but Human Resources. Today's society is living proof that we are all victims of Debt and Slavery. We currently possess the technology and resources to free mankind from servitude, yet we do not, because human manipulation is currently more favourable as it offers a method of control.

The current system, is a system of corporate legal processes, which should be properly distinguished from Lawful processes. Many people falsely believe that the "Legal" system and the "Lawful" system are both the same, this is false.

The Legal system, comes from a seperate society than the one you know, this is the Law Society. Barristers, corporate entities, etc, use a language called "Legalese" which, though similar in sound to english, is actually not the same. You can learn more about Legalese by checking wikipedia or google. Or watch It's An Illusion on your tube or on this site.

It is this "Legal" lingo, that causes mass confusion against the population of people like you and me as certain words which we might perceive to be normal english, actually have dual or sometimes completely different meanings. It is this language that is used against the people to maintain this system of slavery because a). they do not fully understand it. and b). because it can confuse the common person into agreeing to certain terms and conditions which once signed into a contract, become an inescapable trap.

It is the Bankers, who, through utilizing their lawyers and the "Legal" process (not lawful) in conjunction with Political entities who work for the interests of the banks, that allows the system of debt slavery to exist.

In today's society, we are not "people" we are "Numbers" we are "atm cards" we are in fact, "Currency". It is WE who are traded as a currency, traded like cattle. The current uncaring system has time only for those who have made success in the monetary system, and even then, these people will cut each others throats for more, and those who have not succeeded, are considered rejected and thrown to the gutters to die homeless and hungry and cold. This current system of socially offensive competition, destroys empathy and compassion, as each person is forced to compete against the next for their life and livelihood.

How does society treat these people? Society has been indoctrinated to believe that these people are "failures" and "Unworthy of life" hence the often hurtful responses such as "get a job" or "get a life". But what society doesn't actually realize, is that if at any point, the private banking cartels decide to withdraw the money supply, then many members of society can potentially end up in the same gutter that they have looked down into. Take Americas Tent Cities for example. A collection of once proud middle class earners, now shown the door by those who they put their faith in to protect them.

Many people, falsely believe that the European Central Bank, is owned, run and governed by the laws of the nations of the European Union. This in fact, is NOT the case. The European Central Bank, is a "Privately Owned" corporation, it writes it's own legislation, and answers to no nations law.

What is most shocking, is that 90% of people asked are under the impression that it is The Government that prints the nations money, when in fact it is not. For those of you who do not fully understand, this is how it "Really" works.

Your government must "Borrow" it's own money from the European Central Bank, and every penny borrowed by your state, must be repaid "at interest". So where does the interest come from? It comes from "You" the taxpayer, it comes from the millions of small and family owned businesses etc. Where do YOU get the money to pay the debt? Well you get it from the central bank, so in essence, you are repaying debts that can never be repaid, because you are paying back to the banks, the very money that they gave you in the first place. So when your governments borrowing becomes a problem, it is left to you the taxpayer to repay any shortfall in interest owed to the banks, not to mention the many many dodgy dealings that your government colluded with that has left the taxpayer paying substantial bad debts left behind by wealthy businessmen who simply leave you to pay the bills for their failures. The Taxpayer is simply here to carry burden, little more. We are slaves, not just to our own debts, but to the debts built up by squandering governments and property developers. And how do they get out of this? They resort to lawyers and the "Legalese" language to write up yet more impressive and confusing inescapeable contracts that make more empty promises to get us out of the debt we are in. But the debt can never end, because it is what keeps the bank in control. Banking systems maintain control of nations and their people by debt. Think of this when you are applying for your "credit card".

The European Central Bank, and The Government, live in a system where they will always live in a situation of plenty, while those already struggling to survive, are always left to pay the debts. This is a system of perpetual debt, that can never be fully repaid. The system locks you, and your children, and their children, into a forever turning carrousel of debt, for the sake of keeping other people at the top, in situations of power, wealth and corruption.

The ordinary people of Ireland, are perpetual slaves, and your government and every public service department in your country are made up of a series of "Privately Owned Corporations" Your Government, are merely only the Parent Corporation to these. But none of these corporation actually answer to your government.

According to "The Legal" process, when you "register" your child, you are agreeing to hand ownership of them to the state. In fact what you are doing, is prearranging their acceptance of a society they do not know, and agreeing to allow them to become "liable" for the debts of society, which we all know, are never ending.

When you "register" anything with the state, you hand ownership to them. Keep this in mind.

Ref: http://www.zeitgeistireland.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=62&Itemid=85

Fiat Money: The Perfect Scam

2009-08-20T15:14:00.002+10:00

Most countries have central banking - usually (especially in the case of the Bank of England, The US Federal Reserve and the Reserve Bank of Australia) non-government entities that have been given power via legislation to determine the monetary policy of the country. They do this by controlling how much money is in circulation through open market operations (buying and selling currency on the open market). This allows them to determine interest rates and the cash rate which in turn influences inflation, productive output and unemployment.

Another function is that they loan out money to the federal government at interest and this becomes government debt. This is done by the Treasury printing up a number of bonds and these are sold on the open market (mostly to banks as they carry low interest rates). The sale of these bonds transfers to money in the Treasury accounts where it is then used to pay for government programs. The Central Banks then buy these bonds from the bank, using money it created from nothing, and that is how money is created (Martenson 2009). Commercial banks then "loan" out this money at many times what they actually have in their deposits (if there is a deposit requirement), and many of those dollars end up in other banks where it is again loaned out many times, multiplying the amount of debt money in the economy.

(The above was taken from an essay I wrote for a state-funded university and can be seen in its entirety here)

The Herbivore's Dilemma

2009-07-18T21:32:00.001+10:00

The Herbivore's Dilemma
Japan panics about the rise of "grass-eating men," who shun sex, don't spend money, and like taking walks.
By Alexandra Harney
Posted Monday, June 15, 2009, at 2:04 PM ET

Ryoma Igarashi likes going for long drives through the mountains, taking photographs of Buddhist temples and exploring old neighborhoods. He's just taken up gardening, growing radishes in a planter in his apartment. Until recently, Igarashi, a 27-year-old Japanese television presenter, would have been considered effeminate, even gay. Japanese men have long been expected to live like characters on Mad Men, chasing secretaries, drinking with the boys, and splurging on watches, golf, and new cars.

Today, Igarashi has a new identity (and plenty of company among young Japanese men) as one of the soushoku danshi—literally translated, "grass-eating boys." Named for their lack of interest in sex and their preference for quieter, less competitive lives, Japan's "herbivores" are provoking a national debate about how the country's economic stagnation since the early 1990s has altered men's behavior.

http://www.slate.com/id/2220535/

It was just a matter of time, I suppose.

The Venus Project

2009-04-04T16:10:00.002+10:00

The Venus Project began in 1975 by futurist Jacque Fresco. What he calls for is, in his words, "the intelligent management of Earth's resources". This means using technology for sustainable cities, energy efficiency, natural resource management and advanced automation.

It also means abolishing the economic system we have now that creates scarcity in the drive the profit. That means getting rid of money and having a resource-based economy.

For a more detailed explanation, visit the website - http://www.thevenusproject.com/introAbout.php.

Banks manipulating price of gold

2009-03-28T17:39:00.003+10:00

Wow, I knew they did this but I wasn't sure as to exactly how and to what extent. It will require further investigation, but here's an interesting link - http://www.kitco.com/ind/schoon/mar182009.html.

Also:

Wedge strategy

2009-03-27T09:13:00.002+10:00

A 'wedge strategy' is a process of incrementalism used to achieve a final goal.

Politicians use wedge strategies all the time - for example, laws restricting internet use to customise people to accept even more restrictive laws.

If this fails they go back to square one and use some crisis to bring in massive reforms - IE 9/11 and the Patriot Act.

Wedge strategies can be charted so long as you reliably speculate as to what the end goals are.

Deadweight loss

2009-03-27T04:44:00.002+10:00

Deadweight loss - definition:

In economics, a deadweight loss (also known as excess burden or allocative inefficiency) is a loss of economic efficiency that can occur when equilibrium for a good or service is not Pareto optimal. In other words, either people who would have more marginal benefit than marginal cost are not buying the good or service, or people who would have more marginal cost than marginal benefit are buying the product.

Causes of deadweight loss can include monopoly pricing (see artificial scarcity), externalities, taxes or subsidies (Case and Fair, 1999: 442), and binding price ceilings or floors. The term deadweight loss may also be referred to as the "excess burden of monopoly" or the "excess burden of taxation".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadweight_loss

My thesis is that deadweight loss is a huge part of GDP, and I will speculate on who is responsible.

First, GDP stands for Gross Domestic Product, but that's just a fancy word for how much money has been spent. GDP measures spending/income. What it doesn't measure is how much of that spending is done on credit. Therefore it doesn't measure how much debt is in the economy. Therefore it's an artificial measure of prosperity and economic growth in this context doesn't mean much.

Second, alot of the spending goes to a deadweight loss. These are the deadweight losses:

*Lawyers - lawyers don't produce anything of real value, yet they make obscene amounts of money.

*Doctors - the ones who write out prescriptions, make diagnoses and recommend treatments. No service of any real value. Again, make obscene amounts of money.

*Bureaucrats - produce no value at all and waste everyone's time. Funded by taxpayers and a legal monopoly, their main function being to administer the bureaucracy. Including police and military, who are the enforcement arm of the bureaucracy.

*Politicians - paid to lie and lie and lie and lie........... etc.

*Bankers - make loans backed by nothing.

*Mega-Corporations - the ones that take control of natural resources and control the prices, influence government to make favourable regulations, globalise their resources to drive out all the local competitors, etc.

Just imagine what the world would be like if these parasites were gotten rid of.

*

Australia 2020 report

2009-03-27T02:35:00.003+10:00

http://www.australia2020.gov.au/final_report/index.cfm

I just skimmed through some parts of this report, alot of the policies are similar to the current US administration, like they are being synchronised or something (likely that KRudd and Oba-mush are both working for the same people).

Here are some things I found:

*Home energy audits - so they are going to send goons around to low-income households and threaten them with fines/imprisonment if they go over an energy quota?..

*Carbon central bank - where the taxes from cap and trade will go to no doubt.

*Youth national service - just like Obama's volunteer corps.

Of course, at the end of the day most of it is just propaganda, you have to read between the lines about what are their real intentions are.

Seasteading

2009-03-25T13:38:00.002+10:00

The aims of The Seasteading Institute are to create permanent dwellings on the oceans, outside of any national boundaries.

http://seasteading.org/

This is much like other projects that want to create floating cities outside any jurisdictions that will be a haven for 'civil liberties'.

The problem is that only the rich will be able to afford them, at least initially. If the projects are successful then the price might decrease.

Also, there is nothing to stop militaries from any number of countries interfering.

Body 2.0 - Continuous Monitoring Of The Human Body

2009-03-24T09:20:00.000+10:00

Written on March 20, 2009 – 2:01 pm by keith kleiner

Did you ever stop to think how silly and also how dangerous it is to live our lives with absolutely no monitoring of our body’s medical status? Years from now people will look back and find it unbelievable that heart attacks, strokes, hormone imbalances, sugar levels, and hundreds of other bodily vital signs and malfunctions were not being continuously anticipated and monitored by medical implants. We can call this concept body 2.0, or the networked body, and we need it now!

The trio of biomedicine, technology, and wireless communication are in the midst of a merger that will easily bring continuous, 24×7 monitoring of several crucial bodily functions in the years ahead. Unfortunately, as is often the case with medical products, the needed innovations are either already developed or will be soon, but some of the best commercial products won’t make it to the market until years of testing have proven their safety.

In the future your doctor might call you before you have a heart attack, responding to an alarm sent out by monitoring systems in your body that have detected the precursors to a heart attack hours or days ahead of time. With body 2.0, medicine dosages could be tailored precisely to your body chemistry and metabolism. Real-time monitoring of chemical concentrations in your blood could allow for increasing or decreasing dosages accordingly.

The huge amounts of data that would be accumulated from hundreds of thousands of continuously monitored people would be nothing short of a revolution for medical research and analysis. This data could be harvested to understand the minute by minute changes in body chemistry that occur in response to medication, stress, infection, and so on. As an example, the daily fluctuations in hormone levels of hundreds of thousands of individuals could be tracked and charted 24/7 to determine a baseline from which abnormalities and patterns could be extracted. The possibilities are enormous.

Given the advantages, we must wonder why body monitoring is not already more successful and widespread. The answer is that most of the interesting body monitoring we desire requires direct access to the blood stream and other bodily fluids, and this is not an easy problem to overcome.

A straightforward technique is to prick the skin periodically to extract and analyze blood, yet this only works for periodic monitoring. It does not provide continuous access to bodily fluids. Sensors implanted permanently into the blood stream are what is needed, but the difficulty is that moisture, enzymes, and the immune system quickly wreak havoc on mechanical devices and destroy them. Implants also pose several opportunities for life threatening infection to take hold, and this must be addressed.

http://singularityhub.com/2009/03/20/body-20-continuous-monitoring-of-the-human-body/

Living on a boat

2009-03-23T05:43:00.002+10:00

For those who want to escape the control grid, living on a boat is one option.

I'm still investigating it, but I found two good websites for further information:

http://livingaboard.com/

http://www.weliveonaboat.com/

Hydroponics

2009-03-23T05:38:00.002+10:00

Hydroponics is a way to grow plants without soil. The benefit of using hydroponics is that you can grow fruit and vegetables almost anywhere.

This is great for survival, as it is low cost and you produce your own food - not relying on anybody else. In case in the future there is ever food shortages, or you have no money or you want to escape the control grid.

Hydroponics is definitely worth looking into.

The paths of god

2009-03-21T20:00:00.000+10:00

Cannot control everything. Why?

1. Scarcity and competition.
2. Death.
3. Physical limitations.
4. Opportunity cost.
5. Time limit.
6. Energy limit.
7. Lack of information.

The percentage of control versus randomly determined fate.

The rate of increase/decrease of either as a function of time.

Gold VS Dollar

2009-03-21T00:16:00.000+10:00

"8 stages of psychosocial development"

2009-03-20T21:07:00.002+10:00

This is a theory developed by Erik Erikson, and here is a link to the summary chart. It's apparently based on the work of famous Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud.

I'm not saying whether I think this theory is true or not. It does give an insight into how some in the human psychology industry conduct analysis through their work. This is apparently taught to students, as the website disclaimer reads:

This web site was created for use by students in PSY 501. The material on these pages is not intended for use by individuals not enrolled in that course.

The social construction of reality

2009-03-11T17:46:00.002+10:00

The Social Construction of Reality (1966) page 1:"...if the reality of everyday life is to be understood, account must be taken of it's intrinsic character before we can proceed with sociological analysis proper. Everyday life presents itself as a reality interpreted by men and subjectively meaningful to them as a coherent world."

What is social constructionism?
Epistemology (not theory)
Social constructionism stems from epistemological position - not an explanatory theory. It is an approach to psychology (and other bodies of knowledge) which focuses on meaning and power. It focuses on meaning and power because its epistemological position dictates that meaning and power are all that we really can claim to know about. It is called ‘social constructionism’ because it aims to account for the ways in which phenomena are socially constructed. For example, consider the various constructions of ‘war’ which are currently in dispute. We can see that there are multiple ways of constructing what a ‘war’ is and what it would mean, that these are often mutually-exclusive, and that they are developed from various ideological and political interests (i.e. power). For constructionists, all phenomena are like this. (Note that this is different from a ‘social theory’ - it does not say that a behaviour like ‘aggression’ can be explained by social variables; it says that ‘aggression’ itself is a social construct).

http://www.psy.dmu.ac.uk/michael/soc_con_disc.htm

"The matrix is a system Neo.."

Corrupt Banking System - Cartels robbing the public

2009-03-11T12:59:00.003+10:00

Part 1 (other parts just follow the links on youtube):

The DSM - Social Control for Dummies

2009-03-06T23:00:00.002+10:00

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is published by the American Psychiatric Association and provides diagnostic criteria for mental disorders. It is used in the United States and in varying degrees around the world, by clinicians, researchers, psychiatric drug regulation agencies, health insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and policy makers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manual_of_Mental_Disorders

Here is a list of all of the disorders in the current edition: http://psychcentral.com/disorders/

In 2012 they are releasing the 5th edition which will modify and expand the list of disorders in the 4th edition.

http://www.psych.org/dsmv.asp

Criticisms of the DSM generally include a number of things:

No objective diagnostic test for any of the disorders.
Conflicts of interest (mostly from pharmaceutical companies)
Contains vague descriptions of symptoms
Fails to look at other explanations
Previously listed homosexuality as a mental disorder (until it was removed in 1973)

Plus a number of other criticisms - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manual_of_Mental_Disorders#Criticism_2

Cortisol again (not rainbow trout)

2009-03-01T13:19:00.002+10:00

Testosterone, cortisol, dominance, and submission: Biologically prepared motivation, no psychological mechanisms involved

Jack van Honk a1, Dennis J. L. G. Schutter a1, Erno J. Hermans a1 and Peter Putman a1a1 Helmholtz Research Institute, Affective Neuroscience Section, Utrecht University, 3584 CS Utrecht, The Netherlands J.vanHonk@fss.uu.nl D.Schutter@fss.uu.nl E.Hermans@fss.uu.nl P.Putman@fss.uu.nl

Abstract
Mazur & Booth's (1998) target article concerns basal and reciprocal relations between testosterone and dominance, and has its roots in Mazur's (1985; 1994) model of primate dominance-submissiveness interactions. Threats are exchanged in these interactions and a psychological stress-manipulation mechanism is suggested to operate, making sure that face-to-face dominance contests are usually resolved without aggression. In this commentary, a recent line of evidence from human research on the relation between testosterone, cortisol, and vigilant (dominant) and avoidant (submissive) responses to threatening “angry” faces is discussed. Findings, to a certain extent, converge with Mazur & Booth's theorizing. However, the strongest relations have been found in subliminal exposure conditions, suggesting that biological instead of psychological mechanisms are involved.

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=242569

Reconciliation, dominance and cortisol levels in children and adolescents (7-15-year-old boys)
Author: Butovskaya, Marina L.1
Source: Behaviour, Volume 145, Number 11, 2008 , pp. 1557-1576(20)
Publisher: BRILL

Abstract:The stress reduction hypothesis of reconciliation (Aureli, 1997; Aureli & Smucny, 2000) is tested on hormonal level. This study explores the potential relationships between post-conflict behaviour and cortisol level in boys between 7 and 15 years of age observed in summer camp during their free-time playing. Data on 56 boys are presented. Cortisol levels were measured in the morning (fixed time of the day), about 15 min after the end of conflict (PC) and next day without conflict as a match control (MC). Post-conflict of two types were analyzed: those followed with affiliation between former opponents and without affiliation. Age and dominance status of boys were taken in account in analyses of relationships between cortisol and post-conflict behaviour. The differences of cortisol level according to the occurrence of reconciliation were demonstrated. The stress reduction hypothesis of reconciliation was confirmed at the physiological level in children and adolescents.

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/brill/beh/2008/00000145/00000011/art00004

Power structure of New World Order

2009-02-16T14:03:00.001+10:00

The science of tyranny

2009-02-15T12:48:00.003+10:00

The Laffer Curve is a very important economic theory. It is a way of determining how much governments can tax the populations to maximise their revenue.

At 0% they are collecting no revenue, and at 100% they are collecting no revenue.

Governments can either fall on the right or the left of the curve. At the left, we have low taxing and lower revenues. On the right, we have high taxes and the same revenues as on the left. Depending on the government, they will probably either swing between both sides in an attempt to find equlibrium or stay mostly on one side of the curve (either left or right).

Tax slave numbers under criminal "jurisdictions"

2009-01-21T18:22:00.004+10:00

A Tax Slave Number (TSN) is a unique number criminals issue to individuals and organisations to help them administer extortion and other criminal activities.

Depending on the criminal organisation, this number may have a range of names, designations and different definitions for organisational purposes, yet the fundamental nature of it remains the same.

This number is first issued to most individuals within a certain criminal "jurisdiction", in their concentration campuses for mind destruction ("schools"). The reason for this is that children are more susceptible to manipulation than adults.

In order to get the "compliance" of their victims to go along with this extortion, criminals use several methods to implement and enforce this system. They will declare having or declaring a TSN "voluntary", yet claim to extort more value out of the individual if he/she does not submit to providing a TSN. They will also coerce their employer to make regular deductions out of their income. This forces the slave to make a claim, based on their terms, at the end of the "financial year" to try and get a portion of their money back (of course, this does not take into account any possible interest earned on that money nor the effect of inflation).

This TSN has many names or euphemisms - Social Security Number, Tax File Number, etc.

There are several ways to avoid being forced to submit to this coercive practice:

*Go along with their regime, which may allow certain loopholes for tax deductions (usually but not confined to a business entity).

However, due to the expenses that must be made in order to qualify for these tax deductions, this is only achievable to organisations that have alot of resource capital.

*Become an independent contractor and/or business and do not declare your income to the criminals.

The only risk of this practice is if the criminals track you down via their monitoring of financial systems and/or find incriminating evidence during a raid of your premises.

*Trade on the free market.

Another risky practice in certain situations. An informer may alert the criminals to your activities.

Bovination

2009-01-16T14:55:00.002+10:00

Bovination is a Australian-based website that is divided into two sections. One section has a large glossary of political terms and what the 'real' meaning behind them is. The other section is a blog containing commentary on news articles, political issues and current events.

To get an idea of the tone of this website, here are some of their definitions:

Politics: The control of people.

An extension of war by less violent means.
The original politician was a caveman who bashed some other caveman's head in with a rock so he could steal his food and rape his woman. And politics has been thriving ever since. We now have larger social groups so that more powerful governments can control the population, and democracy, which provides a justification for their actions.

http://bovination.com/cbs/politics.jsp

Democracy: Subjugation of the minority by the majority.

http://bovination.com/cbs/democracy.jsp

Love: The desire to control the another's reproductive future.

http://bovination.com/cbs/love.jsp

Welfare: The mechanism by which we subsidize poverty.

Subsidizing anything will create more of it.
If we subsidize public transport, we will have more public transport
If we subsidize nuclear reactors, we will have more reactors
If we subsidize single families, we will have more single families
If we subsidize house construction, we will have more house construction
If we subsidize tulips, we will have more tulips
If we subsidize poverty, we will have more poverty

http://bovination.com/cbs/welfare.jsp

Government: An organization which monopolizes coercion in a region.

http://bovination.com/cbs/government.jsp

I am huge fan of this website, so definitely go and check it out.

Stanford prison experiment

2009-01-15T05:41:00.003+10:00

The Stanford Prison Experiment was conducted in 1971 at Stanford University. It involved a simulation of a prison with college students picked to play prisoners or guards. This was a test to see what the psychology of the prisoner/guard dynamic was, and so people could use the results of this experiment in an attempt to provide clues to larger questions such as how things like the Holocaust or countless other historical accounts of large-scale abuses of human rights could've happened.

The results of the experiment, gave a clue to human nature and how certain systems work.

The reason it is relevant to freedom-seekers, is because it is important to "know thy enemy" and the kind of systems they operate under. Whether this knowledge is useful or not, it is perhaps better to be aware of it than to be in complete ignorance.

The official website of the Stanford Prison Experiment can be found here.

Crippled by their own dependence on their slaves

2009-01-07T15:30:00.002+10:00

Discourse of Voluntary Servitude is an essay written in 1552/1553 by a frenchman called Éttiene de la Boétie.

Here is a summary of his analysis by Frederick Mann, published on http://www.mind-trek.com:

The only power tyrants have is the power relinquished to them by their victims.
The tyrant is often a weak little man. He has no special qualities that set him apart from anyone else - yet the gullible idolize him.
The victims bring about their own subjection - they "win their enslavement."
If without violence the tyrant is simply not obeyed, he becomes "naked and undone and as nothing."
Once you resolve to serve no more, you are free.
We are all born free and naturally free.
Grown-up adults should adopt reason as their guide and never become slaves of anybody.
People can be enslaved through either force or deception.
When people lose their freedom through deceit, it is because they mislead themselves.
People born into slavery regard it as a natural condition.
In general, people are shaped more by their environment than by their natural capacities - if they allow it.
Habit and custom are powerful forces that keep people enslaved.
There are always some people who cannot be tamed, subjected, or enslaved. Even if freedom were to be entirely extinguished, these people would re-invent it.
Lovers of freedom tend to be ineffective because they are not known to one another.
People who lose their freedom also lose their valor (strength of mind, bravery).
Among free people there is competition to do good for humanity.
People seem to be most gullible towards those who deliberately set out to fool them. It is as if people have a need to be deceived.
Tyrants stupefy their victims with "pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes."
Tyrants parade like "workers of magic."
Tyrants can only give back part of what they first took from their victims.
Tyrants attain their positions through: (a) Force; (b) Birth; or (c) Election.
Tyrants create a power structure, consisting of a multi-layered hierarchy, staffed by a conspiracy of accomplices. Accomplices receive their positions as a favor from the tyrant.
The worst dregs of society gather around the tyrant - they are people of weak character who trade servility for unearned wealth.
Accomplices can profit greatly from their positions in the hierarchy.
If people withdraw their support, the tyrant topples over from his own corrupted weight.

^This last fact, must terrify bureaucrats, which is likely why they are trying to establish a New World Order, consolidate power and bring their plans of ultimate mastery over the entire population into fruition.

Ref: http://www.mind-trek.com/treatise/edlb-vs.htm

Reflections of the Omega Point: Frank Tipler and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

2009-01-03T15:32:00.001+10:00

Written by David Healy
Sunday, 18 May 2008 02:27

Beckoning us from some distant future, the Omega Point begins a new paradigm perpetuating all life forever. In doing so, however, a new way of thinking must occur, one where selfishness is vanquished so that a unity of minds can combine into a more cohesive community. On the forefront of this transmigration are two men who have seen the future through different disciplines and have endeavored to interpret its meaning. One of the most important glimpses came from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. A Jesuit priest by training, he helped solidify the Omega point into a spirituality that mankind had to strive for. In contrast, the physicist Frank Tipler used science to prove his observations on what was being projected into the far future. Together these two great thinkers brought about what is to become the Omega Point theory.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin believed that humanity could achieve a form of Godhood or a high level of spirituality called the Omega Point. This was an evolutionary process that everyone could attain through discipline and dedication to the path of enlightenment. He coined the phrase noosphere that is a sphere of the mind above the animalistic biosphere. The noosphere is a sphere of reflection and conscious intentions that binds with all of humanity. He maintains that evolution has a definite direction called an Ariadne’s thread, a connection with the growing complexity of the human mind that seems to push us forward, or pull us toward a time of self-actualized Godhood. He suggests that awareness with self-reflection was the source of transcendence; he says, “an evolution conscious of itself could also direct itself.” If human evolution has a direction then a self-reflecting noosphere could influence its own course toward whatever potential strange attractor lies ahead.

Rest of article here.

Anarcho-socialism: presents wrong solution

2008-12-17T14:18:00.002+10:00

Anarcho-socialism does present positive aspects which are abolishment of capitalism and voluntary associations.

The problem is that if production is organised socially it leads back to heirarchies and something akin to Stalinism.

It precludes individualism, since no individual can become a sole producer of all goods and services at present because of the high production costs.

As has probably been suggested by some who describe themselves as anarcho-socialists, advanced technology would be needed so that production of such things as food, housing, communications and other direly needed goods/services were decentralised and made extremely cheap to produce and therefore neglible.

Voluntary participations in communities would then be not an ideal, but an achievable reality (they cannot be voluntary as long as production is from scarce resources and/or organised along socially mandated lines).

This is not achievable at present so anarcho-socialism (along with anarcho-capitalism) becomes an unsolvable conundrum. Anarcho-capitalism because scarcity necessitates a resource war creating heirarchies with power an efficient means of control, and the same problem plagues anarcho-socialism.

There is only one solution - the only solution. And it is just a matter of time and patience to see if it can be implemented, mostly at an individual level but the social implications are just as interesting.

How to Remove Fluoride from Drinking Water

2008-12-17T09:17:00.002+10:00

Preventing Fluorosis
By Anne Marie Helmenstine, Ph.D., About.com

Most people are aware that there is a controversy surrounding public fluoridation of drinking water. Here is a list of ways to obtain drinking water without fluoride. In addition, I've listed water purification methods which do not remove fluoride from water.

Ways to Remove Fluoride from Water

Reverse Osmosis Filtration This is used to purify several types of bottled water (not all), so some bottled waters are unfluoridated. Reverse osmosis systems are generally unaffordable for personal use.
Activated Alumina Defluoridation Filter These filters are used in locales where fluorosis is prevalent. They are relatively expensive (lowest price I saw was $30/filter) and require frequent replacement, but do offer an option for home water filtration.
Distillation Filtration There are commercially available distillation filters that can be purchased to remove fluoride from water. On a related note: When looking at bottled water, keep in mind that 'distilled water' does not imply that a product is suitable for drinking water and other undesirable impurities may be present.

These Do NOT Remove Fluoride

Brita, Pur, and most other filters. Some websites about fluoride removal state otherwise, but I checked the product descriptions on the companies' websites to confirm that fluoride is left in the water.
Boiling Water This will concentrate the fluoride rather than reduce it.
Freezing Water Freezing water does not affect the concentration of fluoride.

Steps to Reduce Fluoride Exposure

Don't take fluoride supplements.
Read labels on bottled beverages. Unless they are made using distilled or reverse-osmosis water, they are probably made with fluoridated public water.
Consider using unfluoridated toothpaste.
Avoid drinking black or red tea. They come from two different types of plants, but both leaves naturally contain high amounts of fluorine.
Be wary of tinned fish and canned food items. Fluoride may be used as a preservative.
Avoid black or red rock salt or items containing black or red rock salt.
Avoid using chewing tobacco.
Avoid long term use of medication that contains fluorine. Certain antidepressants and medications for osteoporosis contain fluorine.

Ref: http://chemistry.about.com/od/chemistryhowtoguide/a/removefluoride.htm

The singularity really is near

2008-12-09T05:16:00.001+10:00

From NVIDIA's corporate website:

NVIDIA Tesla Personal Supercomputer

Get your own supercomputer. Experience cluster level computing performance—up to 250 times faster than standard PCs and workstations—right at your desk. The NVIDIA® Tesla™ Personal Supercomputer is based on the revolutionary NVIDIA® CUDA™ parallel computing architecture and powered by up to 960 parallel processing cores.

And a News article about it.

Worthy of investigation

2008-11-12T03:20:00.002+10:00

1: Brain Behav Evol. 1999 Nov;54(5):263-75.

Short-term effects of fights for social dominance and the establishment of dominant-subordinate relationships on brain monoamines and cortisol in rainbow trout.

Overli O, Harris CA, Winberg S.

Evolutionary Biology Centre, Department of Animal Development and Genetics, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden. oyvind.overli@devbiol.uu.se

We report changes in brain serotonergic, noradrenergic and dopaminergic activity, along with plasma cortisol concentrations, occurring during the initial 24-h period following the establishment of dominant-subordinate relationships in pairs of rainbow trout. Immediately (within 5 min) after the termination of staged fights for social dominance, a large increase in blood plasma cortisol was observed in both fight losers (future subordinate fish) and winners (future dominant fish). In dominant fish, cortisol decreased rapidly (within 3 h) to the level of unstressed controls, while continuing to increase in subordinate fish. At 3 h following fights, the brain serotonergic system was activated in both dominant fish and subordinate fish, at least in some brain regions (telencephalon). This effect was reversed in dominant individuals within 24 h of social interaction, whereas in subordinate fish a substantial activation of the serotonergic system was manifest in all brain regions by 24 h. Similarly, a strong increase in brain catecholaminergic activation was indicated after 24 h of social interaction in subordinate fish, but not in dominant fish. Relationships between plasma cortisol and brain serotonergic and noradrenergic activity in the various experimental groups suggest that these systems influence cortisol secretion under normal conditions and during moderate or short-term stress.

Copyright (R) 2000 S.Karger AG, Basel
PMID: 10640786 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

Ref: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10640786

Synthetic catalytic scavenger

2008-10-09T12:23:00.002+10:00

An artificial anti-oxidant.

This drug was used on nematode worms and found to expand their lifespan up to 2 times. It's also been trialled on mice.

Ref:

http://sunday.ninemsn.com.au/sunday/cover_stories/article_907.asp

http://www.betterhumans.com/blogs/videos/archive/2008/04/24/BBC-How-to-Build-a-Human--episode-4_3A00_-Forever-Young.aspx

High risk survival strategy

2008-10-05T23:45:00.003+10:00

This is a concept in evolutionary psychology. It is fairly self-explanatory. The only question is, why take a higher risk survival strategy when a lower risk survival strategy is preferable?

Answer - because for some reason, it is not possible or feasible to use the lower risk survival strategy.

Yet, despite the risk level, they are still survival strategies.

Note: this does not mean that higher risk = greater reward, as in some forms of gambling. It's the same end goal, just different methods of getting there.

GPS tracking devices

2008-08-31T14:19:00.002+10:00

One day GPS tracking devices will be able to be used to track every single personal item. This way, theft of property will be hindered greatly.

At the moment there only appears to be two barriers - affordability and practicality. They are far too expensive and too large in size to be installed on most items.

So the hope is that in a few years the size of the circuits will shrink and they will also become a lot more affordable.

Refs: http://www.gpsearch.org/press/rttv/index.html
http://www.crn.com.au/News/77768,aussie-reseller-touts-tracking-device-market.aspx

RE: It's all brain chemicals

2008-08-27T17:19:00.002+10:00

Why trust others when it is illogical to do so? You can never know what another person's motivations are.

One answer to the above question is the neurotransmitter oxytocin. This was demonstrated by an experiment done by the University of Zurich. Here is the abstract of the scientific paper. And a news article done on that experiment.

Nanocomputers in human cells?

2008-08-23T22:26:00.002+10:00

This concept lies well within futurism and science fiction at the moment, yet it is not impossible.

The premise is that you replace the nucleus of the human cell with a computer. This would perform all the functions like:

*Simulate the actions of RNA
*Maintain genetic code and implement the gene expression algorithms
*Construct amino acid sequences for genes

If we could program cells like computers, we would be able to eliminate DNA errors, stop viruses, bacteria and cancer cells as well as add new genetic information.

This won't be practical until nanotechnology gets more advanced and the computing technology used would have to be one that can perform calculations at a size of only a few nanometres.

Ref: Kurzweil, R (2005). The Singularity is Near. USA: Penguin Group. 232-236.

It's all brain chemicals

2008-08-21T22:37:00.002+10:00

There are all kinds of factors that can influence levels of certain chemicals in the brain. The one I am going to focus on is the neurotransmitter, serotonin.

Levels of serotonin have been found to correlate with social heirarchies in vervet monkeys, as this study found. The higher the blood serotonin levels, the more dominant the monkey was over the other monkeys.

But what influences serotonin levels? Stress, lack of sleep, lack of exercise, poor nutrition, etc and possibly a number of other genetic and environmental interactions. If unmodulated, reduced serotonin can lead to mental problems like depression.

These are all fairly predictable from the viewpoint of evolutionary biology.

48 core processors in 2009/2010?

2008-08-18T21:38:00.001+10:00

Intel says 48 core graphics is just over the horizon

By James Sherwood [More by this author]

4th August 2008 15:23 GMT

Intel is releasing the Larrabee graphics chip for high-end PC gaming in late 2009 or 2010, but the company is already talking up the chip’s capabilities in a new paper.

Depending on the model, Larrabee will feature between eight and 48 cores, each of which will have super-fast inter-communication and increase the chip's ability to perform multiple tasks simultaneously.

For example, Intel argues that by having greater numbers of smaller cores, instead of single or dual cores, Larrabee will be able to support better experiences for gamers – a key target audience.

It's purely coincidental that the update comes just days before AMD updates journalists on its graphics strategy and unveils some new silicon at its CTO summit in Iceland.

Larry Seiler, a senior principal engineer at Intel, told journalists at the unveiling of the paper - dubbed Larrabee: A Many-Core x86 Architecture for Visual Computing - that the chip overcomes the limitations of current graphics processors. He added that it provides “the full programming abilities of a CPU” alongside “the parallelism that is inherent in graphics processors”.

Larrabee supports Microsoft's DirectX and OpenGL APIs, which will help software developers to create visual and graphics intensive applications that take full advantage of the chip.
Larrabee will support IEEE standards for single and double precision floating-point arithmetic, which is already featured in AMD and Nivida GPU models.

Jon Peddie Research (JPR) told Bloomberg that success in the high-end graphics market could add up to $4bn to Intel's sales in 2010 - provided it performs as well as rival chips from Nvidia and AMD.

JPR’s latest figures show that 94.4m GPU units were shipped during the first quarter of this year, representing a drop of 0.5 per cent from the previous quarter. However, shipments grew 16 per cent from the same period in 2007.

Intel took pole position in Q1, with 47.3 per cent of the market, whilst Nvidia – which today denied it’s leaving the chipset market – and AMD took 31.4 per cent and 18.1 per cent market shares respectively.

Ref: http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/08/04/larrabee_gpu_benifits/

Some interesting quotes from Starship Troopers (1997)

2008-08-18T21:32:00.003+10:00

On the nature of fascism:

Jean Rasczak: All right, let's sum up. This year in history, we talked about the failure of democracy. How the social scientists of the 21st Century brought our world to the brink of chaos. We talked about the veterans, how they took control and imposed the stability that has lasted for generations since. We talked about the rights and privileges between those who served in the armed forces and those who haven't, therefore called citizens and civilians.

[to a student]

Jean Rasczak: You. Why are only citizens allowed to vote?

Student: It's a reward. Something the federation gives you for doing federal service.

Jean Rasczak: No. Something given has no basis in value. When you vote, you are exercising political authority, you're using force. And force my friends is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived.

Dizzy: My mother always told me that violence doesn't solve anything.

Jean Rasczak: Really? I wonder what the city founders of Hiroshima would have to say about that.

[to Carmen]

Jean Rasczak: You.

Carmen: They wouldn't say anything. Hiroshima was destroyed.

Jean Rasczak: Correct. Violence has resolved more conflicts than anything else. The contrary opinion that violence doesn't solve anything is merely wishful thinking at its worst.

ref: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers_(film)

Investment calculator

2008-07-29T16:30:00.003+10:00

Most compounding interest calculators on the web only calculate a fixed amount of principal money that grows at a fixed interest rate over a certain time.

Well I found a calculator that also includes the effect of annual contributions.

However, that is still far from accurate from real investing. Because contributions may not be the same amount every time, interest rates change, the way they calculate interest can be different, prices for items go up and down, government money is always subject to huge inflation (are we talking real interest rates here or nominal interest rates?....).

Compounding interest is probably the worst way to make money but if you have no money to begin with it's probably your only choice.

Personal genome project

2008-07-24T12:00:00.002+10:00

The aim of this is to gather the information about the complete genomes plus medical data of as many people as possible, to determine exactly which genes give certain traits via using statistical correlation.

This information will be useful for research into personalised medicine.

As of 2008, they are trying to get 100,000 volunteers. The previous project only used 10 volunteers.

The evolution of depression

2008-07-23T21:19:00.004+10:00

There is a great essay on it here but this is my summary:

___________________________________________
Humans need the group to survive, because we are born dependant. Every group organises itself into heirarchies according to certain traits they have. An individual may struggle to move up the heirarchy (or even seperate from and/or create a new heirarchy) due to current circumstances that makes it impossible. Then depression kicks in.

Depression is a feeling of 'hopelessness' that is supposed to make you more dependant on others so that you fall back into your place in the social heirarchy so that you can survive.
___________________________________________

I do not get depression, however, as I have learned how to defeat it so that it only rarely occurs. The only way for me to do it is to be completely purpose-driven, find every way to circumvent any psychological trap and to know what my goals are at any given time. That way, I'm continually building upon my personal enterprise (the name I give to my operations).

In regards to ways of circumventing certain psychological traps - this is actually a very complex series of steps that I cannot yet expand on until I find an appropriate outlet for it.

The closest example I can give is based on reverse thinking (ie. turning something bad into something good) is a book called Reject Me I love it! by John Fuhlman. There is much more to it than that, but this just gives the idea.

Also see this article.

Recent documentaries shown on BBC4

2008-07-22T17:17:00.005+10:00

There are three installments of this series shown sometime in 2008 - The Intelligence Revolution, The Biotech Revolution and The Quantum Revolution - hosted by Michio Kaku.

There is also another three part series they made with Kaku called 2057, another documentary about the future of what kind of changes will happen in the next 50 years, that can also be found on youtube.

The Intelligence Revolution (Part 1)

The Biotech Revolution (Part 1)

The Quantum Revolution (Part 1)

Vitrification agents in cryonics

2008-07-09T22:44:00.002+10:00

This article goes into some detail about the vitrification processes that have been developed.

Vitrification is a technique that is used to minimise ice damage when freezing. This is what companies like Alcor use to cryonically preserve human organs.

I am still not a big fan of cryonics, as there is not even a facility near where I live, there is no guarantee the company can stay afloat, there is not even a guarantee that it would be successful. It is the last option but a pretty poor option at that.

I suppose I would do it if I was able to, but it's not something that is practical for me right now.

Researchers develop neural implant that learns with the brain

2008-06-27T12:29:00.000+10:00

Devices known as brain-machine interfaces could someday be used routinely to help paralyzed patients and amputees control prosthetic limbs with just their thoughts. Now, University of Florida researchers have taken the concept a step further, devising a way for computerized devices not only to translate brain signals into movement but also to evolve with the brain as it learns.

http://www.physorg.com/news133535377.html

The cashless society

2008-06-03T06:50:00.002+10:00

A cashless society is one that relies totally on electronic transactions.

The danger is when all these transactions can be traced via a central computer. The state can then track your every movement.

I came across this article from Money Magazine (a popular magazine in Australia about personal finance issues). Here is an excerpt:

While it sounds like a scene from The Jetsons, Dr Young researched the possibility of an implanted chip that could not only take care of your cash transactions, but also contain medical and other information that might be useful in times of emergency. (He surveyed 523 accountants with a 27 percent response rate and 13 per cent either "strongly agreed" or "agreed" that they'd accept an implantable chip.) Convenient, yes, but it brings up one of the biggest issues when it comes to a cashless society: identity.

"Cashless transactions are about documentation," says Dr Young. "They trace you to a particular time and place, and that information remains in place on various databases around the world. Consolidation of that information is a strong social control and privacy problem. I want convenience, but I don't necessarily want everything I do to be traced."

An implanted chip is just the thing that Alex Jones and other consipiracy theorists keep talking about. It seems like all the major media outlets are trying to warm people to this idea.

This would be catastrophic for individual liberty as it would give the state almost total control - because they could turn off your chip whenever they chose, rendering your ability to function in society non-existent.

Although it may not come to that - it is something to keep an eye on.

Rejecting both capitalism and communism in favour of post-scarcity

2008-05-26T05:46:00.004+10:00

The following are just brief summaries related to the central concept of scarcity, they are not intended to be comprehensive in any way:

Inefficiencies of capitalism

Capitalism is the best system to deal with scarcity - the most efficient way to allocate resources in theory - but scarcity also creates a number of other problems that capitalism cannot solve on it's own. The classic problem of monopolies creating economies of scale that distort market prices, create heirarchies and create an imbalance in opportunities inherent in capitalism.

Of course the state is much to blame for this, but the state is merely just a symptom of the cause. Without the scarcity of certain resources, the state's power would be much diminished.

Anarcho-capitalism

Anarchism without a state. Pure, market driven capitalism in other words. Unfortunately, the state feeds off scarcity like a parasite and the only way to remove the state is to end the scarcity problem.

Communism

Marx's solution to scarcity was to make all production commonly owned. Thus, each worker was entitled to the full product of his labour and profit was abolished.

Communism can work much better (though still inefficient) on a micro-scale (ie; small groups, families, etc) but on a larger scale does not work. This is because it is not as effective as producing goods and services in appropriate quantities without the price system and incentive for profit. It doesn't matter how good the 'planners' were, they could not out-perform the personal decisions of thousands or millions of consumers/producers.

Anarcho-communism

The main difference being that in anarcho-communism, production is organised socially through voluntary associations (how this is achieved, I have no idea).

This is nonsense, however, as wherever there is a society there are heirarchies because not all members could possibly be equal within a heirarchy (this is mainly to do with the inequality in access to resources - material or immaterial).

Then again, what about anarcho-communism without the scarcity problem? Socially organised production without any scarcity doesn't make sense. Each person could then become their own producer of basic goods and services needed for survival, thus they would not have to participate in socially organised production of goods and services.

There will always be scarcity

Scarcity will always exist, at least in the forseeable future, as matter and time are not infinite. There is a finite number of atoms in the universe, and as for time, no living organism can do perform infinite actions at any one time.

Post-scarcity

Not exactly free of scarcity as the term implies but rather an 'extreme decrease of production costs'.

The mechanism by which this could occur is a mastery of all forms of matter, brought about by the process of technological innovation.

Robot built houses

2008-05-16T07:49:00.002+10:00

Apparently the speed of construction would be increased '200 fold' and could be done at a fifth of the cost of traditional construction methods.

Political psychiatry

2008-05-16T03:48:00.004+10:00

This topic I am interested in, as I have been through the mental health system numerous times - sometimes by choice (for varying reasons) and also, in the past, not by choice.

Psychiatry is actually a psuedo-science used for social control and making big profits for the pharmaceutical industry (yet another monopoly tied into the corporate state), masquerading as legitimate medical treatment.

The best academic authority on the myth of psychiatry would probably have to be Thomas Szasz.

The best resource on the web for this topic would be http://www.antipsychiatry.org/.

I'm not going to go into the issue in too much detail on this blog, but I just thought I had to add to it to my online memetic lexicon. Plus, it's useful to be constantly aware of the kinds of tactics the state uses against the individual.

Existential nihilism

2008-04-30T00:51:00.002+10:00

You can read more about it here or here (or a number of other places).

I am somewhat of a nihilist. Sometimes I state I believe in something (such as values, morals) but then in the next moment I don't like to believe it at all. I mean, what use are they? I just go on living day to day and don't have to deal with that stuff anyway.

Existentialism basically means to me, that in the middle of the process of going about your day to day activities, that you basically come to the question: what is the point?

And then combine both existentialism and nihilism and there really is no point. Anything you can come up with would be totally arbitrary. As Jean Paul Satre said - "existence precedes essence".

But ultimately I think you have to reject nihilism as a whole because you have to give the universe meaning otherwise there is no point in doing anything. So the search for meaning is an endless quest that will lead you down many false roads, but it has to be done anyway.

US researchers have built a proto-prototype nano assembler

2008-04-30T00:41:00.001+10:00

Read article.

The world's shortest political quiz

2008-04-27T23:00:00.002+10:00

I try to avoid discussing politics anymore. Politics is largely irrelevant. There's no use worrying about it, the only thing you can really do is concentrate on gaining your own freedom. And ignore politicians.

Anyway, this quiz is the best as it shows what everything really boils down to. There really is no 'political spectrum' to speak of. Politics is really just about one thing.

Here is the quiz.

3 ways to make money online

2008-04-27T15:46:00.001+10:00

Bicameral theory of mind

2008-04-17T19:38:00.002+10:00

The Bicameral theory of mind was developed by Dr. Julian Jaynes (1920-1997).

A good summary of the different stages is written here:

1. Pre-conscious; Bicameral stage 1:
Automatic visions and voices tell you what to do. You automatically obey the "voices of authority." You think and speak like a slave. Obedience is paramount.

2. Proto-conscious; Bicameral stage 2:
Automatic feelings and thoughts tell you what to do. You behave like: (a) A true believer (sometimes a fanatic fighter for a "great cause"); or (b) A helpless wimp (languishing in apathy, sometimes complaining); or (c) A self-righteous preacher (making self "right" and others "wrong"); or (d) A macho rebel (compulsively fighting "the system," "the IRS," "the government"). Being "right" is paramount.

3. Conscious; Conscious stage:
You have largely mastered your feelings and emotions. You have the ability to critically examine every concept, every thought, every action. You strive to increase your competence in every aspect of your life. You carefully observe the results you produce, using that as feedback to improve your concepts, thoughts, communications, and actions. You live free and creatively - you are a Freeperson. Producing results is paramount.

Rest of article: http://www.mind-trek.com/reports/tl10-2.htm

Social entropy

2008-04-16T20:26:00.002+10:00

Basic definition:

A measure of the natural decay of the structure or of the disappearance of distinctions within a social system. Much of the energy consumed by a social organization is spent to maintain its structure, counteracting social entropy, e.g., through legal institutions, education, the normative consequences or television. anomie is the maximum state of social entropy.

http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/SOCIAL_ENTRO.html

I also found an interesting paper on it and how it relates to the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

Employee leasing

2008-04-14T21:42:00.002+10:00

One of the better ideas I've come across:

LIBERTY LEASING
A Modest Proposal for Freedom in Our Time
By L. Reichard White rick.rabbit@surfboard.com
Exclusive to _The Libertarian Enterprise_

Suppose a company, called perhaps "Liberty Leasing" (L.L.), couldapproach an employer with the following proposition: "I can take overyour legal liability for employing your worker, John Freeman, and yourtotal cost of employing him will be 5% less than it is now." At thesame time, suppose Liberty Leasing (L.L.) could give John Freeman a 15%increase in take-home pay --- and could make 10% for itself as well.

Full article here.

I'm not sure if this is possible in most areas, however, as the state may create/already have created a lot of legal hurdles to prevent this from happening.

The closest thing I've experienced to the above concept is sub-contracting, where you work for a company or companies but no taxes are taken out of your pay (as you are expected to pay them yourself), the state gives you a business number and you are expected to comply with alot of their regulations on business. I would not really call sub-contracting something like operating a business, though.

However, as a small time operator you may get away with not telling the state anything or having to pay any taxes on your wage. Many sub-contractors or 'sole-traders' do this as the taxes they would have to pay are too burdensome (as they don't get any of the legal protections that an employee would).

Yourdiagnosis.com

2008-04-10T21:20:00.003+10:00

This site proports to give users a range of medical diagnoses based on the information given in a lengthy questionnaire.

I did the questionnaire and it took me about an hour. I told them almost every little health problem I/'ve had. It gave me a long list of possible conditions I could have, and the probability I have them based on the information I gave them.

OnSingularity.com

2008-04-08T12:29:00.002+10:00

This site I found has user-submitted news relating to interesting technological developments. It is like the newsfeed on Kurzweilai.net except this site is more like a blog.

Other good sites to check out are:

Betterhumans.com
Imminst.org
AccelerationWatch.com
SingInst.org

Moore's law and Kurzweil's law of accelerating returns

2008-04-05T20:11:00.004+10:00

Moore's law was founded by Gordon Moore, who co-founded Intel. It is based on his observation that computing power seems to be doubling every two years or so. However, initially this only described the number of transistors on an integrated circuit, but eventually this law was expanded to include other significant trends as well (describing the growth in computer power in terms of price/performance).

This law is important as it can be used, with the law of accelerating returns, to predict the singularity.

The law of accelerating returns describes that systems that evolve will do so exponentially until it 'hits a wall' (ie. biological evolution) unless it goes through a paradigm shift in which case the exponential growth can continue (ie. vacuum tube computers to microprocessors).

With this knowledge - some futurists can predict the future very accurately, within a certain standard deviation of a point of time in the future, given that such trends will continue unabated.

Links:

The Law of Accelerating Returns - http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1

Moore's Law - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law

On demand manufacturing

2008-04-02T14:42:00.003+10:00

Manufacture and Sell Anything — in Minutes
By Ian Mount 03.24.08 6:00 PM

Jeffrey Wegesin is a furniture maker. His most popular creation is a curvaceous side table, and even though he has sold only two copies of it, he has already turned a profit. He did it without so much as setting foot in a wood shop. And he is not alone. Wegesin is one of 5,000 merchants who have established accounts with Ponoko, a year-old on-demand manufacturing service in New Zealand. Designers upload their blueprints to Ponoko's servers; when a customer places an order, Ponoko's laser cutters automatically trim wood and plastic to create the product on the spot. Wegesin, a Web designer, sells the tables through the site for $250, not including shipping. He then pays Ponoko $124 for each table to cover the cost of materials and cutting fees. The $252 he's brought in so far may not be much, but because he incurred no up-front costs it comes as pure profit.

Welcome to the age of the instapreneur. With nothing more than a design, amateurs can manufacture jewelry, robots, T-shirts, furniture — anything. No warehouses. No minimum orders. And no money down. The digital economy isn't just digital; the same market forces that allowed midlist musicians to make a living distributing their songs online now give amateur clothiers the chance to sell their wares without having to persuade Barney's buyers to carry them.

Thousands are launching instant businesses. Zazzle, of Redwood City, California, offers a dizzying array of user-designed products from posters to tennis shoes. StyleShake, a custom-clothing site in London, received 25,000 dress designs in its first three months. Spreadshirt, founded in Leipzig, Germany, hosts 500,000 individual T-shirt shops. "These companies significantly lower the threshold for someone to bring anything to market," says Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms. "There's an industrial-age bias that you need volume to support a factory; but with this, much-more-creative low-volume businesses become viable."

These are not just CaféPress-style in-jokes — T-shirts and mugs meant to appeal to a small circle of friends. According to Spreadshirt CEO Jana Eggers, her site saw a 30 percent increase last year in the number of North American shop partners that sold more than 1,000 shirts annually. Even CaféPress has become a bona fide business platform. Jim Gamble, a Bay Area entrepreneur, uses the site to sell 50,000 of his T-shirts and bumper stickers — all emblazoned with conservative political slogans — every year, giving him an income "well into the six figures," he says.

Large brands are starting to see the appeal of manufacturing-as-a-service, too. Lexus recently used Blurb, an on-demand publisher, to print 1,800 copies of a book promoting the automaker's green practices. Franchises from Dilbert to the Discovery Channel sell licensed merchandise on CaféPress. Disney has uploaded more than 3,500 of its designs to Zazzle, allowing the company to sell a wider range of products than just the blockbuster Mickey Mouse T-shirts favored by conventional retailers. The service also gives the Disney machine unprecedented agility. "Here, I can see that Hannah Montana is taking off, we can upload a design right into Zazzle's system, and in a day or two it's a product," says Patrick Haley, senior manager of customization for DisneyShopping.com.

As everyone gains the ability to create and sell anything, the long tail will apply to making things as well as to selling them. Amazon.com may be able to offer near-infinite inventory, but only as long as the products exist. On-demand manufacturing could eliminate that constraint, leading to a world where products are always available, nothing ever gets discontinued, and the virtual shelves are always stocked.

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-04/bz_instapreneur

The future of biomedicine: virtual humans

2008-03-31T20:56:00.001+10:00

Computers and biochips could lead to better drugs, personalized medicine
By Bryn Nelson
Columnist
MSNBC
updated 9:02 a.m. ET March 17, 2008

This is your brain on a chip. This is your liver on a slide. This is your body in a supercomputer. Any questions?

It’s a bit more complicated than that, but recently scientists have provided a sneak preview of the future of biomedicine with a range of projects seeking to assemble virtual humans — or parts of them — on computers and “labs on a chip.” Someday, the descendants of these sophisticated new programs and devices could serve as our stand-ins for clinical tests on drugs, cosmetics and toxic compounds.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23447395/

Software turns cell phones into Wi-Fi hotspots

2008-03-31T20:09:00.002+10:00

By Peter Svensson
updated 3:44 p.m. ET March 26, 2008

NEW YORK - Here's a cool use for a phone that has both cellular broadband and Wi-Fi: Turn it into a mobile Wi-Fi hotspot so your friends can surf the Internet on their laptops.

A couple startups have created and made available software like this in the last year. But a more established software maker said Wednesday that it has created a package for carriers to offer their customers.

TapRoot Systems Inc. of Research Triangle Park, N.C., said it was talking with carriers about providing their customers with the software, which would let up to five Wi-Fi users connect to a phone.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23813890/

This is great, but we just need more companies to offer wi-fi, the services to become cheaper, faster access speeds and more downloads.

I need to know my genome, dammit!

2008-03-31T01:33:00.002+10:00

The very first step to customising your dna that mother nature crapped you out with is knowing what your personal genome is. Unfortunately, that costs too much money at the moment and most can only afford to get parts of their genome sequenced.

Well, one company has claimed to have gotten the cost down to $60000, which is not so bad considering a few years back it cost millions.

Hopefully in the next few years they'll bring the cost down even further, and usher in the age of personalised medicine. Then sickness from errors in the gene pool will become less of a hinderance to those trying to survive in what is what is currently still a world very much based on survival of the fittest (or most healthiest or with beneficial attributes gained via natural selection).

Micronations

2008-03-31T00:55:00.002+10:00

A micronation is your own sovereign state that can be populated by only one person (theoretically).

Ok, so how do I do it? The aim should be to escape the control by living under the auspices of any authoritarian nation, by setting up your own.

Not many have succeeded in setting up a physical micronation (one that is not just virtual or done in principle) as either they are crushed by authoritarian states or simply just fail.

#You need to set your country up somewhere outside of the control of authoritarian states, as they have greater military power, you have no choice.

#Be able to trade with other nations to meet your micronation's requirements otherwise to set up your own industries.

#Sound infrastructure.

At the moment, doing that on your own is very difficult. There are not many prospects currently for joining any libertarian movements (ie Freedom Ship) either.

The best bet is, if you have the resources, to live out in the middle of nowhere (sea, desert)
or just live completely anonymously in an authoritarian state.

It is still a great ideal though.

Future technologies needed to easily setup a micronation would be cheap and efficient solar cells (energy production), global wi-fi (telecommunications) and nanofactories (manufacturing, agriculture). Too futuristic though, at this point (with exception to the solar cells maybe).

Bionic eye

2008-03-29T11:28:00.002+10:00

"Bionic" Contact Lens May Create Tiny Personal Displays
Joab Jacksonfor National Geographic News
January 29, 2008

A new contact lens embedded with electronic circuits could be the seed for "bionic eyes" that can see displays overlaid on a person's field of view, researchers say.

The minute circuitry could aid the vision-impaired or could be used to create tiny but discernible readouts offering data such as driving directions or on-the-go Web surfing.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/01/080129-bionic-eye.html

I heard about this a while ago. But what I imagine these things could be used for would be to have an endless stream of information based on your personal data all streamed directly via wi-fi to your field of vision. Life would be made so much easier with more efficient personal digital assistants - entropy would be turned to extropy and so on.

Personalised medicine

2008-02-12T13:20:00.000+10:00

Genes determine the color of our eyes and shape of our bodies. Genes also determine our susceptibility to disease and how we respond to medicine.

Researchers believe that each person has about 35,000 genes. The complete set of genes together is known as the human genome, commonly referred to as "the instruction manual" for how the body works. Each gene carries instructions for making proteins, which direct the body's cells and functions.

Most cells have 46 chromosomes--23 from each parent. Chromosomes contain thousands of genes, which are made up of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the chemical material that is inherited.

Genomics is the study of an individual's gene structure, including how the genes interact with each other and with the environment. Experts say genomics has the potential to revolutionize the practice of medicine. That revolution, called "personalized medicine," includes the use of genomic information to improve the diagnosis of disease, as well as the prevention and treatment of disease.

An example of a preventive approach is when a genetic test predicts which diseases an individual is likely to develop. For instance, people who have certain mutations in the BRCA1 gene have a high risk of developing breast, ovarian, and possibly prostate, and colon cancers, according to the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Alterations in the BRCA2 gene have been associated with breast, pancreatic, gallbladder, and stomach cancers. An example of a treatment approach is when a genetic test determines whether a person is among the 10 percent of those for whom a particular drug is likely to work.

Felix Frueh, Ph.D., associate director for genomics in the Food and Drug Administration's Office of Clinical Pharmacology and Biopharmaceutics, says, "Personalized medicine tries to answer questions like: Why do some people get cancer and others don't? Why is cancer more aggressive in this person compared to that one? Why does this drug work for you and not me? Why does someone need twice the standard dose to be effective? And why do others need only half of the standard dose?"

"The goal of personalized medicine is to get the best medical outcomes by choosing treatments that work well with a person's genomic profile, or with certain characteristics in the person's blood proteins or cell surface proteins," Frueh says. Genetic information isn't usually meant to be used alone to make treatment decisions, but rather is used with other factors such as the patient's family history, medical history, clinical exam, and other non-genomic diagnostic tests.

http://www.fda.gov/fdac/features/2005/605_genomics.html

Banker's Paradox? Reciprocal Altruism?

2008-02-01T19:23:00.000+10:00

--Thus, Tooby and Cosmides conclude, the Banker’s Paradox* leads us to an evolved psychology where “if you are unusually or uniquely valuable to someone else — for whatever reason — then that person has an uncommonly strong interest in your survival during times of difficulty. The interest they have in your survival makes them, therefore, highly valuable to you. The fact that they have a stake in you means…that you have a stake in them. Moreover, to the extent they recognize this, the initial stake they have in you may be augmented.”8 Through such augmentation can the poor become rich through the evolved foundation of friendship**.--

*The Banker's Paradox is that people who need the credit the most are the ones with the highest risk to lenders so they can't get the credit.

**Too bad there is no real concrete means to all of this - too subjective and arguments can and do occur.

This is all from Michael Shermer's book called "The Mind of the Market" and you can view the prologue where I got this from here.

The future of technology

2008-01-07T22:36:00.000+10:00

This video goes through most of the expected technological advances expected to happen, set to music and various images. Not a bad video, but I'm not sure how accurate it will be (a lot of it is based on many different kinds of futurists' predictions).

Economics of power

2007-12-24T11:30:00.000+10:00

Power is something not usually talked about in economics. Economics has to do with scarcity, and the distribution of resources based on scarcity. Well, free markets are the most efficient solution. But it doesn't take into account who has more power and the way they use that power to gain all the resources.

Anyway, I found a good podcast that discusses these issues, that can be downloaded here.

Abstract:

The Political Economy of Power
August 14, 2006, Featuring Bruce Bueno de Mesquita
Russ Roberts talks with Hoover Institution and NYU political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita about his theory of political power--how dictators and democratically elected leaders respond to the political forces that keep them in office. This lengthy and intense conversation covers a wide range of topics including the evil political genius of Lenin, the dark side of US foreign aid, the sinister machinations of King Leopold of Belgium, the natural resource curse, the British monarchy in the 11th century, term limits and the inevitable failure of the standard methods of fighting world poverty.

Are Humans Evolving Faster?

2007-12-22T22:11:00.000+10:00

Researchers discovered genetic evidence that human evolution is speeding up – and has not halted or proceeded at a constant rate, as had been thought – indicating that humans on different continents are becoming increasingly different.

“We used a new genomic technology to show that humans are evolving rapidly, and that the pace of change has accelerated a lot in the last 40,000 years, especially since the end of the Ice Age roughly 10,000 years ago,” says research team leader Henry Harpending, a distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Utah.

http://www.physorg.com/news116529402.html

If humans are evolving at a faster rate, it must be due to the rapidly changing environment. Hence, those with genes insufficient enough to adapt will be behind in the race - until technology can catch up to meet those needs making the race of survival a more equal one.

3D printing and open-source software

2007-12-22T21:27:00.000+10:00

Desktop fabricator may kick-start home revolution
17:59 09 January 2007
NewScientist.com news service
Tom Simonite

The Fab@Home device can be used to create 3D objects from various materials

A cheap self-assembly device capable of fabricating 3D objects has been developed by US researchers. They hope the machine could kick start a revolution in home fabrication – or "rapid prototyping" – just as early computer kits sparked an explosion in home computing.

Rapid prototyping machines are already used by designers, engineers and scientists to create one-off mechanical parts and models. These create objects by depositing layer upon layer of liquid or powdered material.

These machines typically cost from $20,000 to $1.5 million, says Hod Lipson from Cornell University, US, who launched the Fab@Home project with PhD student Evan Malone in October 2006.

The standard version of their Freeform fabricator – or "fabber" – is about the size of a microwave oven and can be assembled for around $2400 (£1200). It can generate 3D objects from plastic and various other materials. Full documentation on how to build and operate the machine, along with all the software required, are available on the Fab@Home website, and all designs, documents and software have been released for free.

"We are trying to get this technology into as many hands as possible," Malone told New Scientist. "The kit is designed to be as simple as possible." Once the parts have been bought, a normal soldering iron and a few screwdrivers are enough to put it together. "It's probably the cheapest machine of this kind out there," he adds.

The machine connects to a desktop computer running software that controls its operation. It then creates objects layer-by-layer by squeezing material from a mechanically-controlled syringe. A video shows a completed machine constructing a silicone bulb (16MB, wmv format).

Unlike commercial equipment, the Fab@Home machine is also designed to be used with more than one material. So far it has been tested with silicone, plaster, play-doh and even chocolate and icing. Different materials can also be used to make a single object – the control software prompts the user when to load new material into the machine.

Malone and Lipson hope Fab@Home will grow into a community of enthusiasts who share designs for 3D objects and even modify the machines for themselves. This will prompt the emergence of widespread personal fabrication, Lipson hopes.

"We think it's a similar story to computers," he explains. "Mainframes had existed for years, but personal computing only took off in the late seventies." A cheap self-assembly computer called the Altair 8800, launched in 1975, sparked the rapid development of personal computing, he notes: "We hope Fab@Home can do the same for rapid prototyping."

Adrian Bowyer, who is also working on rapid prototyping machines at Bath University, in the UK, agrees that the technology could have mass appeal once the equipment is cheap enough. One of his own machines can even make some of its own parts (see 3D printer to churn out copies of itself).

"Fab@Home is an interesting idea; it should be easy for anyone in the world to build," Bowyer says. "Once you've used one you never want to go back, it's liberating and enormously fun." Bowyer believes the technology could one day even replace traditional models of manufacturing.

Bowyer adds that the Fab@Home machine could probably already be used to make many cheap injection-moulded products already on the market: "I can imagine people swapping plans of things to make online, or paying to download them instead of going to the shop."

http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn10922-desktop-fabricator-may-kickstart-home-revolution.html

10 min documentary on nanotechnology research at UC Berkely

2007-12-21T16:32:00.000+10:00

Basically it's good because they state their goals in the research - cheaper solar power and medical nanotechnology.

Roadmap on research into molecular manufacturing complete

2007-12-09T15:44:00.000+10:00

The Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems describes ways to move nanotechnologies forward in directions I have outlined in my technical publications. It centers on today's capabilities, exploring the rewards we can expect from incremental advances, and links these advances to longer term objectives for atomically precise manufacturing (which, by the way, are quite unlike the popular fictions). Perhaps of greatest value, the Roadmap identifies broad criteria that can help researchers and research managers select high-payoff projects that can contribute to the emerging field of atomically precise nanosystems engineering. An area of special promise is integrating other nanotechnologies into complex, functional systems by exploiting recent breakthroughs in building self-assembling, atomically precise DNA structures.

Pretty cool, the whole thing can be dowloaded here:
http://e-drexler.com/p/07/00/1204TechnologyRoadmap.html

Social Dominance: An Intergroup Theory of Social Hierarchy and Oppression

2007-11-23T06:15:00.000+10:00

Free ebook on the subject.

Correlates with my earlier post about the social heirarchy, but in way more detail.

More evidence of biological cause of mental illness

2007-11-23T06:05:00.000+10:00

Is allergic rhinitis more frequent in young adults with extreme shyness?

A preliminary survey
IR Bell, ML Jasnoski, J Kagan and DS King Harvard Medical School Department of Psychiatry, McLean Hospital, Belmont, Massachusetts.

Previous studies suggest that social anxiety, allergies and distressed affect may be interrelated in some persons. For example, extremely introverted patients experience a poorer course and outcome of allergies as well as greater degrees of distressed affect such as depression and anxiety than do extraverts. Patients with affective disorders have a higher prevalence of atopic allergy than the general population; families of patients with panic disorder and major depression have the highest frequency of shy children. Preliminary investigation also indicate that behaviorally inhibited Caucasian children (initially shy and cautions in unfamiliar situations) and their families have more allergies, especially hay fever, than do uninhibited, socially outgoing children. The present survey evaluated the frequency of self-reported shyness. The most introverted subjects had significantly higher scores on self reports of depression, fearfulness, and fatigue, as well as a higher prevalence of hay fever. The data support the possibility of a distinct subgroup of shy individuals with concomitant vulnerability to specific allergies and affective disorders.

http://www.psychosomaticmedicine.org/cgi/content/abstract/52/5/517

I think it's obvious - if you get a faulty gene and have to live with a chronic sickness like an allergy disorder - you are going to feel bad because you are sick all the time. It is not that hard to put two and two together. Biology, currently, is still an important factor in how it relates to your position in the social heirarchy.

The Anarchist Banker by Fernando Pessoa

2007-11-10T15:54:00.000+10:00

Tyranny was created?... How was tyranny created?

- In the following manner... Some bossed others and led them where they wanted to; some imposed themselves on others and made them into what they wanted; some would scam others into doing what they wanted. I'm not saying they did this in serious things; really, there were no serious things there to be done. But the truth is that this happened always and everyday, and not only in propaganda-related subjects, but outside of them as well, in trivial everyday things. Some would unconsciously become bosses, others unconsciously subordinates. Some were bosses by imposition; others were by schemes. This was seen in the simplest of acts. For exemple: two of the guys would be going down a street together; they'd reach the end of the street, and one would have to go right and the other left; it was conviniente for each one to go in his particular direction. But the one that went left would tell the other , "come with me this way''; the other replied, and rightly, "Man, I can't; I have to go that way'' for some reason or another... But ultimately, against his will and convinience, there he'd go left with the other... This was once due to persuasion, another time by mere insistence, a third time for some other motive... This is, never because of a logical reason; there was always something spontaneous in this impostion and subordination, almost as if instinctive... And as in this clear example, in all other cases; from the least to the most important... Do you see what I'm getting at?

- Yes. But what the devil's so strange about that? It's the most natural thing...

- Is it? Let's see. What I ask you to notice is that it's completely contrary to anarchist doctrine. Notice that this took place in a small group, a group of no influence or importance, a group to which was not entrusted the solution to some grave question or decision about any dire matter. And notice that it took place within a group of people that united especifically to do whatever it could for the anarchist cause - i.e., to fight, as much as possible, the social fictions, and create, to a certain degree, future liberty.

Thanks to Acton from ASC for the above translation.

Happy November 5th!

2007-11-05T13:17:00.000+10:00

Let's just hope that what they are actually celebrating for Guy Falkes day is his attempt to blow up parliament, not him being caught then executed.

Endgame - new Alex Jones documentary

2007-11-02T16:55:00.000+10:00

Basically it's about how the global elites are trying to take control and establish a one world government to enslave the population and keep themselves in power.

The 2 hr 19 min video can be viewed here for free, or you can go and buy it in better quality at his official site here.

It is a pretty good documentary, probably his best yet. Focuses more on the global situation rather than just the USA. The only bad thing is that it might depress you or make you more paranoid. I just hope that it won't happen, but the evidence Jones uses is pretty convincing.

The Social Heirarchy

2007-10-30T00:47:00.000+10:00

The social heirarchy is what I call society. It fits somewhere in between these two extremes:

A top-down, 'dictatorship'

A decentralised heirarchy containing only families (as human babies are born dependant on others, it is currently an unavoidable to have these type of social units).

Now ideally, everbody should be at the top of the heirarchy, but this is impossible. The only way it can be done, is if there is no heirarchy at all. First you have to eliminate the heirarchy by making each individual as powerful as the other, so none can attack the other without immediate retaliation. It's kind of like how the USA and USSR were in a cold war. If one nuked the other, the other would immediately retaliate, destroying them both. Thus, this is the only way peace was achieved.

So, here we have the best situation. No social heirarchy, all defences against the other equal, no power imbalance, no statism or other stupid ideologies forced on people and anarchy.

Some people may want to stay in the heirarchy, but as I said in my previous post (Virtual Communities) - you can still share information/trade with others yet not be part of any heirarchy. The worst heirarchies, however, are forced on the individual (parent-child, cop-'citizen', government-individual, etc).

Examine your memeplex

2007-10-28T04:29:00.001+10:00

Basic definition of 'memeplex' from Wikipedia:

Much of the study of memes focuses on groups of memes called "memeplexes", "meme complexes" or "memecomplexes" — such as religious, biological organisms, cultural, or political doctrines and systems. Some selfish genes propagate more effectively together. Similarly some memes propagate more effectively together; they are called memeplexes. Examples are sets of beliefs like acupuncture and astrology, sets of traditions like Christmas celebrations, circumcision, languages, political ideologies, religions and scientific theories.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memeplex

The enemy of the memeplex is called 'cognitive dissonance' - here is the basic definition of that from Wikipedia, again:

Cognitive dissonance is a psychological term describing the uncomfortable tension that may result from having two conflicting thoughts at the same time, or from engaging in behavior that conflicts with one's beliefs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

Cognitive dissonance can be good though, as it may force you to re-examine your beliefs. Then again, it could drive you insane.

Police have no duty to protect you at all

2007-10-27T19:50:00.000+10:00

Ok, anyone reading this blog would know that I hate the police. Why? Because they are a bunch of thugs that enforce unjust laws.

Well, here is another thing:

Actually, it cannot work out any other way, really - as the police have too few resources to be able to effectively protect anybody. But that's not the point. The point is, that not only are you forced to pay for police through taxes and in a lot states they ban weapons so you can't defend yourself - and police don't even have an obligation to protect you! That is a very bad double standard.

Not only does the presence of police create crime, by enforcing unjust laws and persecuting innocent people but it also helps out criminals by disarming people so they can't defend their property and make them dependant on police who don't even have to bother protecting them.

More info: http://www.firearmsandliberty.com/kasler-protection.html

Molecular assemblers

2007-10-22T00:04:00.000+10:00

Molecular assemblers are basically small(er) factories that use nano-machines to build virtually any product.

For more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_assembler

OR

I also downloaded the Nanohive@home distributed computing system software to use my computer's resources for large-scale nanotech systems simulations. Just doing my bit for the singularity... You can download the software here. For further info, go here.

Virtual communities

2007-10-16T00:29:00.000+10:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_community

Internet forums are close to ideal virtual communities. It's all about exchanging ideas and debating. If you don't like somebody, plonk them.

It differs from real communities because in real communities you have to put up with other people most of the time and you have much less choice about who to interact with.

And if you don't like the community, you have many others to choose from.

I predict that in the future, most people will be a part of virtual communities, and will reject real communities because they offer far less.

Also, in a virtual community I don't have to worry about a social heirarchy imposed by some psychotic dictator and his followers.

Fantastic Voyage: Live long enough to live forever

2007-10-15T22:19:00.000+10:00

I just bought this book - basically it is about keeping your health in check and staying alive (adjusting for your biochemistry, using supplements, diets, etc) until the biotechnology revolution in a couple of decades time, when you can extend your lifespan even more. Then hopefully you can make it to era of medical nanotechnology - and from then on live forever. It is written by Ray Kurzweil, author of Singularity is Near and The Age of Spiritual Machines. Looks like an excellent book, I can't wait to read it.

Gene therapy - an overview

2007-10-08T17:41:00.000+10:00

Gene therapies are where it's at and the near future looks quite exciting in how it will be applied. Here are some quotes I read from Access Excellence website:

Each of us carries about half a dozen defective genes. We remain blissfully unaware of this fact unless we, or one of our close relatives, are amongst the many millions who suffer from a genetic disease. About one in ten people has, or will develop at some later stage, an inherited genetic disorder, and approximately 2,800 specific conditions are known to be caused by defects (mutations) in just one of the patient's genes.

Yeah, I hate faulty genes, that's for sure. Faulty genes have ruined my life - giving me fairly good health except for a crappy respiratory system.

In the U.S. and Europe, there are exciting new programs to 'map' the entire human genome - all of our genes. This work will enable scientists and doctors to understand the genes that control all diseases to which the human race is prone, and hopefully develop new therapies to treat and predict diseases.

Ray Kurzweil talks a lot about this and how because of accelerating returns we will be mapping individual human genomes very soon.

Much attention has been focused on the so-called genetic metabolic diseases in which a defective gene causes an enzyme to be either absent or ineffective in catalyzing a particular metabolic reaction effectively. A potential approach to the treatment of genetic disorders in man is gene therapy. This is a technique whereby the absent or faulty gene is replaced by a working gene, so that the body can make the correct enzyme or protein and consequently eliminate the root cause of the disease.

More info here:

http://www.accessexcellence.org/RC/AB/BA/Gene_Therapy_Overview.html

Image courtesy wikipedia

Post-scarcity

2007-10-04T20:21:00.000+10:00

With advances in technology, primarily nanotechnology in which the raw material is information, and we can rearrange atoms to make pretty much anything, we could easily move from a scarcity-based economy to an abundance-based economy.

http://www.postscarcityeconomy.com/

At the moment, resources are limited. Which means that economics dictates who gets what. Not only economics, though. Economics doesn't describe something called power. Power, as I described here, is basically the ability of someone to use coercion (mostly threats, but when it comes down to it actual physical force with the most extreme being inflicting death). Economics does influence power. But power isn't entirely dependant on economics. For example, the 'President' of the 'United States of America' isn't the richest man in the world, but he is extraordinarily powerful.

The aim of the singularity - actually the aim of all civilisation, should be to eliminate scarcity as much as possible. Because of scarcity, we have the rich-poor divide. We have individuals who lack the resources to live healthy and happy lives. We have people who must put up with the coercion of the state.

But then comes the second thing we have to overcome - power. Will the singularity eliminate or decentralise power? By all accounts, it would. The more resources individuals have to avoid the state, the less power the state has. The only problem is, that some technologies can magnify the state's power, not lessen it. But the state would need a very good justification to use these technologies to intrude into everyone's lives. That's where terrorism comes in.

And, surprise, we are already seeing this happening. The only consolation is that it's not likely the state will be able to ban any of these technologies because by doing so, it will enable other countries to soar ahead of them.

For more reading on post-scarcity, wikipedia has a good general article - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_scarcity.

Singularity Summit 2007 podcasts

2007-09-22T19:17:00.000+10:00

Well they updated the page on the latest Singularity Summit by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI). The previous summit was held in 2006. A lot of the notable thinkers on the singularity give a speech and answer questions.

Podcasts can be streamed or downloaded here.

The SIAI was set up as a think tank to contribute to a positive singularity. Their main webpage can be found here.

I haven't had the time to go through them all yet but it looks to be very interesting and a lot of info to tide us over while we continue through the long wait until the big event. ;)

Techno Utopia - principles

2007-09-05T17:13:00.000+10:00

I was just reading this on wikipedia and found it very interesting:

Principles

Bernard Gendron, a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, defines the four principles of modern technological utopians as follows:[8]

We are presently undergoing a (postindustrial) revolution in technology;
In the postindustrial age, technological growth will be sustained (at least);
In the postindustrial age, technological growth will lead to the end of economic scarcity;
The elimination of economic scarcity will lead to the elimination of every major social evil.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techno-utopianism#Principles

Particularly the last point, that the elimination of economic scarcity will end social evils, I found to be very interesting. Not only does that reflect my views but a lot of others as well.

Ending Aging

2007-09-04T23:11:00.000+10:00

New book from Aubrey De Grey. It sounds pretty good. A brief description:

MUST WE AGE? A long life in a healthy, vigorous, youthful body has always been one of humanity’s greatest dreams. Recent progress in genetic manipulations and calorie-restricted diets in laboratory animals hold forth the promise that someday science will enable us to exert total control over our own biological aging.

Nearly all scientists who study the biology of aging agree that we will someday be able to substantially slow down the aging process, extending our productive, youthful lives. Dr. Aubrey de Grey is perhaps the most bullish of all such researchers. As has been reported in media outlets ranging from 60 Minutes to The New York Times, Dr. de Grey believes that the key biomedical technology required to eliminate aging-derived debilitation and death entirely—technology that would not only slow but periodically reverse age-related physiological decay, leaving us biologically young into an indefinite future—is now within reach.

In Ending Aging, Dr. de Grey and his research assistant Michael Rae describe the details of this biotechnology. They explain that the aging of the human body, just like the aging of man-made machines, results from an accumulation of various types of damage. As with man-made machines, this damage can periodically be repaired, leading to indefinite extension of the machine’s fully functional lifetime, just as is routinely done with classic cars. We already know what types of damage accumulate in the human body, and we are moving rapidly toward the comprehensive development of technologies to remove that damage.

By demystifying aging and its postponement for the nonspecialist reader, de Grey and Rae systematically dismantle the fatalist presumption that aging will forever defeat the efforts of medical science.

Decentralisation of the electrical grid - only a matter of time

2007-08-29T21:50:00.000+10:00

Forecast for solar power: Sunny
USA Today, August 26, 2007

Solar power has long been the Mercedes-Benz of the renewable energy industry: sleek, quiet, low-maintenance.
Yet like a Mercedes, solar energy is universally adored but prohibitively expensive for most people. A 4-kilowatt solar photovoltaic system costs about $34,000 without government rebates or tax breaks.

As a result, solar power accounts for well under 1% of U.S. electricity generation. Other alternative energy sources, such as wind, biomass and geothermal, are far more widely deployed.

The outlook for solar, though, is getting much brighter. A few dozen companies say advances in technology will let them halve the price of solar-panel installations in as little as three years. By 2014, solar-system prices will be competitive with conventional electricity when energy savings are figured in, Deutsche Bank (DB) says. And that's without government incentives.

Full article: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/environment/2007-08-26-solar_N.htm

Takahashi: A future of embedded chips, networks

2007-08-27T11:31:00.000+10:00

By Dean TakahashiMercury News
Article Launched: 08/23/2007 01:36:45 AM PDT

Sometimes technologists don't stretch enough when they make predictions. That's when it's time to bring in a science-fiction author. The organizers of the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University relied on this wisdom for their keynote speaker this week.

And Vernor Vinge didn't disappoint the 600 chip designers at the conference. The author of sci-fi books "Rainbow's End" and "True Names" held the attention of the audience, partly because he is a retired computer science professor who spoke their language and has been writing sci-fi since 1965.

Vinge thinks of the future in scenarios. Because microprocessors are built into everything from cars to toys, he says he can foresee a rosy scenario where everything around us has electronic awareness built into it. I spoke with him afterward and he told me it would only require an incremental economic build-out of the current embedded electronics to lead society to a state of "digital Gaia," a reference to the theory that the Earth is a living, interconnected being.

As we get cheaper processors and sensors that are networked, these components can form the infrastructure for ubiquitous digital communications, like a sea of "digital plankton" that becomes the beginning of the food chain for all kinds of rich electronic services. If you're thinking of an Internet that connects everyday things, such as sensors in a vineyard or a networked alarm clock, you have the idea.

But he also sees four scenarios that can get in the way of such a world.

The first failure scenario would happen if Moore's Law, the prediction made by Intel Chairman Emeritus Gordon Moore that the number of components on a chip would double every couple of years, comes to a halt after decades of progress. But Vinge thinks the economic demand for progress is likely to keep the engines of Moore's Law going.

The second failure would happen if software can't keep up with hardware. The slow progress of artificial intelligence, for instance, is due more to the failure to create the right software for it than hardware that lacks performance. Chip companies like Intel are loading up chips with multiple cores, or computing brains, to avoid overheating problems associated with single-core chips. But they will have to wait for the software programmers to catch up, and if software becomes too complex to manage, it will never catch up. Vinge says the consequence could be disastrous: Imagine a multitasking air traffic computer sending 12 airplanes into the same airspace.

The third failure scenario happens when the software works, but the hardware doesn't. If we come to rely on a sea of chips embedded into everything, there is always the chance that the hardware will fail under the conditions when you need it most. We can avoid this future, Vinge says, if we preserve our hardware design diversity, avoiding a "monoculture." He said, for example, that we should avoid using only semiconductor chips and embrace other kinds of technologies - maybe quantum computers - that could serve the same purpose.

The fourth scenario of failure comes about when we surrender to the government. This happens if we pour all of our resources into security. Recent headlines about congressional approval of warrantless wiretapping leave him worried that the government will one day ask to put its own circuitry into every chip, justifying this action in the name of security. Chips with eavesdropping circuitry built into them would arguably create conveniences, like automatic tax collection on every single transaction performed with those chips. We'll never have to calculate our own taxes again or try to drive over the speed limit. The chips won't let us.

Clearly this was tongue-in-cheek praise on his part. He was winking at me the whole time he talked about the great benefits of such government omniscience. In reality, he said, this could lead to the nightmare of totalitarian control that Orwellians never imagined.

Vinge may sound paranoid. But he is simply taking today's headlines and stretching them to their logical conclusions in the future. It would behoove us all to start thinking about these scenarios and how to head them off.

But he also sees four scenarios that can get in the way of such a world.

http://www.mercurynews.com/businessheadlines/ci_6695964?nclick_check=1

If the fourth scenario happens, people (and AI) will create counter-measures to stop the government chips from spying on us. I mean, the demand for those services would be huge. Because if the government could spy on everything you're doing, it would just get totally out of hand.

It would take an unimaginable tragedy for the people to accept that kind of government control in their lives. Hmmm...

Eddie Mabo

2007-08-26T14:35:00.000+10:00

Basically he said to the terrorcrats - you don't own this land that I have inherited and lived on all of my life.

Because when the British came, they claimed the land was 'empty'.

So he went to court and won on the grounds of common law.

But the terrorcrats bureaucratised the system of who gets native title claims.

They also - surprise, surprise - let them practice their traditional law as long as it doesn't conflict with civil law. ::)

Yet still, it's amazing that he even won to begin with.

What if, everyone one of us decided to challenge the state's 'jurisdiction', using something like the affidavit of truth ([url]http://www.mind-trek.com/practicl/afdv-gen.htm[/url]).

But it only worked for Mabo because he had a lot of people on his side.

When I say 'jurisdiction', I mean just over one thing. All you have to do is target one little area and the state would topple like a pack of cards.

One day they'll slip up and someone brave enough will jump at the opportunity and attack them at their weak spot.

That weak spot will be hard to find, because the state are usually pretty good at having all of their bases covered.

Legal systems across the world. Civil law is orange; other systems are common law (lavender), mixed civil and common law (purple), custom (yellow) and fiqh (green) [courtesy wikipedia].

Surviving Immortality: Just getting to the Singularity is the hard part.

2007-08-21T11:00:00.000+10:00

August 17, 2007
Surviving Immortality: Just getting to the Singularity is the hard part.
By Robert X. Cringely

I've been thinking about the Technological Singularity, which to proper geeks is that point where computers become smarter than humans and supposedly all bets are off as technological development races forward faster than we can catch it and you and I are either left eating bonbons or are put to death by computers no longer amused by serving us. Life post-Singularity will, of course, be somewhere in between those two eventualities. Zits may be abolished but youth will still be anguished. Computers may be designing warp drives but I'll still be paying my mortgage. Rather than a technological Hell or Utopia, the Singularity is likely to leave us still in our sitcom just with different props. What's fascinating about the Singularity is not so much guessing what life will be like then as looking at our very approach to the concept and some likely side effects we'll bump into along the way.

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070817_002727.html

Follow up to Power: The Courts

2007-08-19T14:35:00.000+10:00

So what is a court then? A court is supposed to enforce justice. But courts don't do that. Justice is about fairness, equality and morality.

Courts don't enforce justice. They enforce laws. As I said, laws are just squiggly lines on bits of paper.

So what courts are really about is power. Power means violence. To threaten and coerce with capable means far beyond whoever they are threatening/using violence against.

So they are fake courts - enforcing fake justice using the method of violence.

When will they finally stop lying and admit that what they doing is about power, not about justice or anything else. If you can turn lies into truth, then you can get away with almost anything.

Power

2007-08-01T13:24:00.000+10:00

Today I'm going to talk about power. What is power? Some people say that those who have a lot of wealth have financial power, and so on. But that's not real power. To put it bluntly - put a billionaire, an attractive woman, a highly charismatic person and a guy with a gun in the same room. Who has the power? The guy with the gun of course - he has the power over life and death which is stronger than anything else.

When bureaucrats talk about all their laws and bits of squiggly lines it doesn't mean anything. What really matters is that they have the power to enforce them. Power matters. Power is the difference between a king and a peasant. A dictator and a civilian. The police and mostly everyone else.

And people flock to the powerful. The powerful get more recognition and gratitude than everyone else. Whilst the weak are despised, trodden on and discarded. It is survival of the fittest after all.

Power is the caveman with the pointed stick. He is boss because he has a pointed stick and if you don't do what he tells you, he will use it to beat you to death. That is power.

The powerless have a choice:

*Climb your way to the top - hell, why not? Remember, if you want to be like them, you have to think like them and act like them. Become what you hate. If you can't beat them, join them.
* Become invisible - schrodinger's cat reference. Unobserved. This is a difficult option, though, at the moment. It requires a lot of knowledge and resources.
* Live like a bushpig - not really a desirable option.
* Just go on and live like a slave just like everyone else - that is fine for most people, but if you already of an anarchist bent it's going to frustrate you to no end.
*Kill yourself - look at it this way; if you are not afraid to die, then everything else should be easy.

OR just survive. Do what you have to just to survive. Who knows what might happen? Will the future give us freedom? The caveman with the pointed stick cannot harm an uploaded transient distributed consciousness. No matter how hard he tries to beat a computer monitor to death.

Social Heirarchy

2007-07-19T11:51:00.000+10:00

Some life forms need to interact. The number one reason is to mate - otherwise they would be extinct. This necessates some kind of interaction. There are other survival reasons too. The group tends to provide security in the sense of providing food sources more easily and other forms of protection.

The basic heirarchy goes as follows

Alpha -> Beta -> Omega

The alpha is the leader, the beta is second in command and is vying for the position of 'alpha; and the omega is just a follower. Despite routine beatings and harassment, the omega will still blindly follow as a survival tactic. Human society is full of millions of these heirarchies - going from the state to the labour situation to the family.

It is impossible to avoid unless you can eviscerate yourself from family, state, friends and basically all human relationships of any kind.

Can you exist outside the heirarchy? Yes, a "sigma". You don't want to lead or follow. You are not on the social ladder - you are totally seperate from the social ladder. They have no relevance as you exist in a world of your own, outside the boundaries of social rules that the heirarchy creates.

An ideal becomes a goal even if not entirely practical within certain confines, but nonetheless achievable within reality.

Tax File Number

2007-06-26T23:15:00.000+10:00

So the Australian Tax Office uses a simple algorithm to assign a valid tax file number (this is the number they use to cross reference your income payments and make it easier to enslave you).

So there is a site where you can actually generate any tax file number you want using the method provided. I'm not sure if this will work or not, but I'll give it a try anyway (better than them actually knowing what I'm earning).

http://bioinf.wehi.edu.au/folders/fred/tfn.html

Court speech

2007-06-18T18:45:00.000+10:00

Well court again soon and it may mean jail for me this time so I'll post a transcript of the speech that I'm going to give (and hopefully not interrupted during it):

~~~~~~~~~~~~

What happened was - that I was driving along the highway, minding my own business and doing nothing wrong whatsoever, when I was pulled over by the police for no reason at all. There is a thing called "JUST CAUSE" - basically it means you have to have a good reason. Just Cause was invented so the police don't abuse their powers. For example, raiding your house or stopping you and searching you whenever they feel like it. Of course they can use a blanket excuse for this - such as it is always possible, that I have drugs, guns or a nuclear bomb in my possession. These police use the excuse that anyone at any time could be driving while intoxicated and be a danger to society. But they never have any proof - it is just a sneaky way to deprive people of their freedom and create a police state.

Yet I have no intention of challenging the state in any way. I am just trying to live my own life and make a living. I even asked a previous judge if I could obtain a work permit to drive. As all I use my car for is to go to work and get groceries. I am no danger to anyone. Yet the judge refused and did not give any reason why. This makes life very difficult for me as I have to travel many different places as part of my job - and using public transport is very inconvenient and adds many more hours of travel time. I don't know why I should have to do that when I have a functioning car and no record of having caused an accident.

Although I know that pleading is useless as the whole court game is designed so that the state wins and I lose. I am nobody - a completely powerless individual. The state has manpower, vehicles, popular support, guns, pepper spray, bullets, batons, jails, guns and more guns. As Mao Zedong said: "Political power comes through the barrel of a gun". There is the perverse thrill that comes from domination and it is shown by this power exchange. If I ever tried to resist state coercion I would end up with a bullet in my head. That's the way the system works. Hundreds of people go through the court system every year. And the result is always the same. I can only plead guilty or not guilty. But that is not what counts. It is what I plead "innocent" or "guilty" to. I may be pleading innocent or guilty to any matter of absurd things when you look at it objectively. An historical example is the trials people had for witchcraft. The similarity is that it was all based on current beliefs. Because the fact is that the law is not a science. They are the opinions of a small group of very powerful people. These people got into power via a very corrupt system (I refer you to the Albert Langer case about preferential voting a few years ago). The point is that the way things are run are not at all fair. They are run through the threat of violence and mob rule. And again - I am just an individual - I have no chance against such overwhelming odds except to avoid it as best as I can.

So the real reason I am here is because if I didn't turn up then a warrant would be issued for my arrest. Then what could happen is people armed with guns would go to my house and force entry if they have to - or force me to pull over if I'm driving. They would then force me to go with them. If I resisted then they would use escalating violence - depnding on how far I was willing and capable of resisting. the ultimate level of violecne they would use is to end my life. Probably with a bullet to the head and my brains and bits of my skull splattered all over the place. So really I am here under the threat of death - for a "victimless crime" - and I am considered the criminal?...

Hence, the law. The law is words - written, typed or spoken. The theory is based on the original law document called the constitution. The constitution says that if I was born on a particular piece of dirt I am a slave to the state so long as I remain there. This is not based on reality. It is just words. Otherwise i would go and live on a desert island somehwere where people would leave me alon. The only thing that makes the law real is people willing to sue violence to enforce it - no matter what it is they are enforcing.

Which brings us to the sentence. Now that I have spoke my mind - I fully understand that you as the Judge wil give me the worst penalty that you can hand down as I didn't act as submissive as you expected. But I really did not know what else to say. You may say I don't take any responsibility for my actions but I am always fully responsible for what I do unlike you who can escape responsibility frequently as you can impose very severe costs on many other people and yet absolutely no repercussions at all to yourself.

I am no criminal - in the true definition of a criminal - one that threatens or uses force against property or persons (for example rapists, murderers, theives, robbers, thugs, kidnappers, frauds, extortionists, etc).

The fact is that the monopoly over the roads is not a natural monopoly. Governments built the roads using funds they stole in the name of taxation. And so the only efficient way of transport is via commandeering your own vehicle - as no alternative exists yet. In the future, there may be self driven cars - but that is still many years away. And if you remember, one of the UN Declarations of Human Rights is that everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state (article 13). By preventing me from driving - you are severely restricting my freedom of movement.

So I will not enter a plea. I do not see the point. The state will keep taking advantage of it's power by abusing everyone they can. As long as they can get away with it. Having a monopoly on justice will do that. The state will not last forever anyway - evolution of technology and hence the freedom of the individual through technological means will put an end to state control. So fine, convict, extend my disqualification period, order me into some kind of discipline program, jail me, etc. I no longer have any fear of torture, humiliation or death. In the end it won't make any difference.

And that is all I have to say for now.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~