Via some Whatever comments, this little gem from Hermann Goering on how to swing public opinion around to stand solidly behind a war it doesn't want:

"...Naturally, the common people don't want war...that is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship. ....Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

I am not a big fan of this war, as some of you may have guessed. But I don't oppose it for political reasons, although God knows there are enough of those to sate any objector's conscience. My objection to the war is more broadly based - I oppose war itself, on the grounds that there are other cheaper and more effective ways to handle international conflict so that no one is asked to kill someone else as part of the process.

...like not being the world's biggest exporter of corporate slave labor and their seemingly inevitable accompanying environmental disasters.

...like not short-circuiting local elections in resource rich or strategically well-placed countries in order to install ruthless, oppressive despots that happen to owe us one (and then continually getting our pie-poking fingers burned when the political filling turns out to be too hot to handle).

...like not spending more money on diet books to fix our inability to moderate our own appetites than we do on foreign aid to feed those who have no food, flaunting our richness without sharing it.

But one of the biggest reasons we go to war, whether we want to face it or not, is that it is so damn profitable. Industry booms, technology explodes and the fires of patriotic spending burn high (buy American, spend taxes on things to give you a greater, albeit false, feeling of security, send corporations overseas to support the recently bombed-into-the-stone-age infrastructure and so on).

And for that reason alone, war will be with us for as long as we, as a society, will do more for profit than we will for peace. Not many corporate heads would walk away from a huge, sustained profit during war to put their legislative and socially affective weight behind a far less lucrative peace. Unfortunately, in this country anyway, the celebratory shouts of the trading bullpen by far drown out the screams of the dying and the tears of their family.

And lest any of us start to feel self-righteous about the situation, keep in mind that we all benefit from this war-feast. Innumerable inventions that make life better and easier (not to mention more fun) were a direct response to war and the need to be able to kill more efficiently while keeping our own side from being killed. The microwave is a direct decendant of radar. All the cool applications we get from GPS are based on what was originally a purely military satellite system for spying on other countries. And countless medical advancements were developed from battlefield inventiveness - or the torture of captive prisoners.

Without war, we would have to forgo quickly-prepared food, travelling in unfamiliar areas without concern for getting lost and war-created advancements like the Red Cross and the concept of helicopter medivac transport, which saves innumerable lives today - just to mention a bare few.

I think this is something that the peace movement needs to address - not just the human cost of war - however important that may be - but the economic cost of stopping it. Unless you can convince corporations, organizations and nations that they can recreate their war-chest income within a peaceful environment, and do so reliably and sustainably, war will always be the first resort rather than the last. Because power and might not only gets things done, it gets them done in an extremely profitable manner.

For those who can make a profit from war without having to face the reality of a bullet or a bomb directly, there really is no downside - you can make money off the build-up, the carry-through and the rebuilding process, all the while garnering positive PR by taking whatever stand on the conflict that is popular and by spreading relief and humanitarian aid around like the public geniality of a privately abusive family member - and get rewarded with a tax break for doing so.

War is hell. But it is also money. And that alone is enough to keep it rolling along for the foreseeable future. And only when our society cherishes peace, love and brotherhood far more than money, effortless living and easy decisions, will that change.

From Forever Geek comes a literally mindbending article on how to hack your brain with an iPod.

It's called entrainment...[snip]

...basically, the idea is that you can modify the electrical activity in your brain (the stuff that's picked up by EEG readings) by hearing sounds that mimic those waves. But since the human hearing range doesn't extend to that level, instead, you listen to two similar but different sounds, one in each ear, and the resonance between them delivers the effect of the frequency.

The upshot of it is, you pump the sound into your brain via your ipod, and you sleep deeply or just relax, feel like you've had too much coffee, generate lost time, or even like you're getting a tooth drilled. And yes, there's also sexual stimulation, sexual simulation, and LSD simulation

Check it out, folks. There's lots of linky goodness to sound files to accomplish this hack. But I'm miffed that there's no "strangle cell-phone shouters with the power of my mind" file. And I was soooo hoping.

Update: Here's a Wikipedia entry on binaural phenonmenon, with even more linkaliciousness.

As an update on my rant about taxes, here is an organization that is lobbying to create a Peace Tax Fund, basically an alternative place for conscientious objectors to pay their taxes into without supporting war.

Sounds like a winner to me. Right now, the only real way to avoid doing that is through war objector tax non-payment, in which conscientious objectors who are otherwise perfectly willing to pay all their taxes if they had an alternative, but religiously or spiritually incapable of supporting war, don't pay the part or all of their taxes on the grounds that is supports war-like activities. Currently, we send them to prison. Under this bill, they could stay out of jail, maintain their religious prinicples and the government would still get all it's money. I call that a win-win.

In a recent article out of the World Business Council fo Sustainable Development, they talk about a poll that shows 76% of Americans are "disgruntled about weak national leadership on climate change."

While I understand the heart of the article - to point out how the government's stance is out of step with its citizens' - there is an underlying truthiness here that seems to have escaped mention.

These same 76% of Americans are still driving gas-hogging cars made with tons of petrochemical plastics and riding on oil-based roadways, and they're often either driving long trips for non-essential purposes (an hour to the mall, 45 minutes to eat out) or using the car for shorter, walking-distance trips, and probably both.

They are demanding MegaMart-priced products whose cheapness requires that they be produced in countries who keep prices low by forgoing things like environmental protections, mass transit and energy efficiency, and that involve being shipped halfway around the world via resource-heavy, oil-fueled transportation,.

They purchase cheap food produced on resource-gobbling factory farms, expensively shipped across the world and kept artificially fresh through energy-hogging climate-controlled warehouses. These foods are then processed and packaged in what appears to be a race to see who can use the most resources to get the smallest and lowest quality product to market, or they are prepared and eated in energy-burning, lowest-common-denominator food portals whose very existence is a tribute to the disposable economy.

They insist on building gigantic McMansions whose structure, site orientation, size and style are status broadcasting engines rather than a reflection of the environment's needs, resulting in a home that has to be force-heated, force-cooled, force-lit and force-circulated. Not to mention that these edifices are built with non-local materials that are produced with resource-intensive practices and that have to be shipped in from God knows where, not to mention the fact that a good percentage of the finished product are plastics and other oil-based components that go into erecting the modern-day home.

Solar panels? Not "cost effective," and you might have to restrict your personal electrical usage from that of a large third-world city to that of a small third-world city. Plus, the panels clash with the resource-richly mined and imported slate roof. Wind power? Too ugly and there's no wind in a McSuburb where you live surrounded by your target peer group anyway. Electric car? Too "hippy" and really...it's hardly a Lexus, is it? And let's not even mention bicycles, walking, buying locally grown and made, going veggie and organic and so on. I mean, we have an image to maintain, after all.

When I think about it, I feel the government actually is spot on with the mindset of the public, because what the public does says volumes about what they really want, regardless of what they say or even what they think they want. America has what passes for a representational democratic government. Of the people, by the people and for the people.

Slavery was ended only after we quit talking and started acting, and even then it took a full-fledged civil war to move our monolithic government toward legislation. Civil rights only became embedded in law after we literally set cities on fire over it. Environmental issues were only really taken seriously after several inescapable incidents, such as rivers catching on fire and air becoming literally unbreathable, made it so we couldn't look away anymore.

Our government is a reflection of our society, not the other way around. And it's a poor reflection at that - less a mirror than a laggy, half-heard echo from a distant and acoustically damaged surface. In other words, we have to recognize that we really do have a government of the people - until we make the changes in our lives that force action because inaction is no longer tenable, government simply will not buck the cushy corporate interests that keep it in office, nor will it have the energy to push against the supermassive inertia that afflicts any governing body. It's a simple cost ratio - when it costs more to sit still than to move, then and only then will government move.

We have to make the first, second and third moves in this issue. We have to provide the outside force that overcomes governmental inertia. The government is simply not going to step in and "make" us do what we know we should be doing, but can't bring ourselves to do of our own volition. That's not it's job. It's job is to support the will of the people, as demonstrated by the people's actions. And if you ask me, that's exactly what it's doing.

Got our tax bill in this week. Apparently we did quite well last year. Well enough to make us seriously consider not doing nearly so well this year, even if just for a fleeting moment. Our normal 'when all is said and done' tax bill has been somewhere in the vicinity of a few hundred bucks. This year - well, lets just say that our previous bill would be a generous tip you might leave for a dinner as costly as this year's bill. Ouch.

Of course, we really won't do so well this year - we'll be pulling up stakes and moving, with all the finanacial upset and chaos that entails. Which will make paying last year's bill even more painful.

But, on the other hand, paying taxes is concrete proof that A) we are making money (far more than we have in the past, which is a good thing) and B) we are pulling our weight to pay for all those citizen-supported policies and programs that most of us, myself included, rely on to keep the juggernaut of American life rolling - cheap food via subsidies, cheap health care at the county clinic, Medicare and disability (just in case), cops, judges, highways, bridges, small business resources, clean water, PBS, literacy programs and so on.

It pays to feed the hungry, provide clothes to the ill-equipped and teach the unlettered. It pays to send food to places where food no longer grows and to build houses for those whose belongings are under a mountain of rock, or washed out to sea. It pays to send free, yet vital, information to newly minted entrepreneurs and newly created mothers. It provides shots to children who would die without them and shots to ease the pain of those who are already dying.

Of course, some may point out that a lot of our taxes probably goes to things I wouldn't support out of choice. But some of the things I wouldn't support are things that other people fought hard to get. And some of the things I mentioned above as a plus are things that others don't support. I can live with that. That's what elections are for.

So yeah, it hurts to think of how I'm going to pay my taxes this year. But it hurts in the way that a post-op surgical wound hurts - painful, but tempered with the knowledge that the pain is a result of what is otherwise a good thing. I only have that pain because I am making enough money to live better than last year and to pull my weight as a citizen of this country (even if, from time to time, it seems like we're all pulling in different directions).

So, thank you sir! May I have another!

Ever wonder why Google searches are beginning to return so many look-alike results - and how you can tell the good from the bad? Read on.

One of the primary tenets of quantum physics is that observation changes that which is observed. On a quantum level, simply looking at something alters its behavior by virtue of introducing an outside energy source into the equation and therefore changing what the observer sees (for example, viewing atomic particles visually introduces light, the energy of which changes the particles observed by banging them about with photons and altering energy levels).

This sort of thing happens in macrospace as well. For example, observation of a news event changes the story by changing the actions of those involved as they react to being observed. The bigger the eyes of the observer (say, going from a small town press to CNN) the bigger the shift in behavior.

And currently, to paraphrase AC/DC, Google's got the biggest eyeballs of them all.

Not only is this observation changing the way content providers format their material to vie for page rank, it is changing the nature of the content itself, content that most of us rely on to provide us with important, and sometimes essential, information.

In a recent article, WS Journal writer Lee Gomes explains how the very presence of Google's observational powers is changing the nature of online "original content."

Gomes went online as a pen for hire to see what is really involved in creating this surge in keyword heavy online original content, and what he found was not pretty:

My job, it became clear, was to make enough small changes to the text [copied directly from existing online sources] for Whirlywinds to be able to pass it off to search engines as his own. Which is, in fact, what most of the "original content" on these sites turns out to be: cut-and-paste jobs with superficial modifications.

At $2 an article, tops, that's all anyone can afford to provide -- even in India and Eastern Europe, where most of this work gets done. My conscientiousness with the first piece was, in retrospect, comical.

This is bad enough, but during this process Gomes often received direct instructions to leave out any "negative comments" in content about potentially dangerous products and to insert alarming "facts" (such as information that bird flu is passing from human to human or that it hibernates for centuries) that were patently not true.

So what does this mean for most of us? Depends on who you are. For writers, it means more pricing pressure as crap-mills spew out cut-and-paste junk for pennies on the dollar-value of real, researched original content. For content providers, it will mean a harder slog to fight off the temptation to buy this crap and instead to hire real writers and pay real fees to produce real, informative original content.

Unfortunately, for Joe Q Public looking for information online, it means we are going to have to work a lot harder to find relevant, reliable information that shows all sides of the issue instead of what is essentially infomercial trash. The problem is that this crap will all sound eerily like the real thing, except for a few key (and possibley vital) points.

Have fun.

Went up to mom's last night to see if hubs could figure out what was making her plumbing fail to drain. It had always been sluggish since she bought the house last year, but now it wasn't working at all - not the kitchen sink, not the shower, not the washing machine and worst of all, not the toilet. Poor mom was stuck spongebathing and hiking out to the old outhouse in winter weather. Not good.

Well, after much exploratory surgery on hub's part (and a few glasses of blackberry wine next to the fire for mom and me) the two of us were called outside to witness what the dear boy described as a "39 inch hickory spider."

Turns out, a local hickory tree had insinuated a root into a pipe joint and had produced a prodigious net of root filiments which had subsequently collected and enrobed a solid, yard-long mass of...well...we'll just say it was solid and leave it at that. The pipe had been totally blocked by this impressive hunk of ugly, which had completely filled the pipe on both sides of the seam.

We gaped at it a bit, like looking at a car wreck where you want to look and know you shouldn't, and tried to imagine how long it had taken to get to that size (probably years). But it was too cold to linger and mom's dogs were starting to show an unhealthy interest in the object, so hubs went ahead and got rid of it while mom and I returned to our fire and wine, duly sobered. And seriously grossed out.

But all's well that ends well. Mom has free-flowing plumbing now. And a healthy respect for the hickory trees out back. Suddenly, we're all rather fearful of the thought of laying down at the base of them on a summer afternoon, within reach of their roots. I mean...you just never know, do you?

I've started to notice that when I'm talking to my grandmother, either on the phone or as I'm leaving the house, her normal farewell isn't of the "I love you" or "Have fun" or "Talk to you later" variety.

It's "Be careful!"

Just that, with apparently no further explaination required.

If I'm going for a walk in the park - "Be careful!"  If hubby and I are going out to dinner - "Be careful!" If I'm ending our phone conversation to resume my previously uneventful exercise of laying about on the couch watching Law and Order reruns - "Be careful!" (and I'm looking out for...what, exactly? The couch is going to swallow me whole? The cats might get peckish and start eyeing me as a food source? Aliens are going to take over my brain through basic cable?)

Granted, as my mom pointed out, this is more or less her way of saying "I love you." But to me, that seems kinda sad. I mean, from her point of view, darkness borders every one of life's activities, just waiting to decend on those foolish enough to go forth cavalierly and without due loin-girding against the vagaries of fate. Real life - the going-out-on-a-limb, charting-a-course-for-waters-unknown, head-out-on-the-highway sort of life - is a horrific, terrifying thing. Her perpetual fear and greatest conviction is that Something Awful (the dreaded, formless Something Awful) could happen to any of us at any moment. And her most immediate and comforting expression of love is a brief prayer that we'll all be able to foresee this darkness coming and with that foreknowledge, be able skate through life completely ensconced in a fluffy cotton-wool cocoon of blandness experiencing nothing unpleasant or unsettling. Be careful!

OTOH, to my mind the worst thing that could happen to me is that my grandmother's ideal would come true - that nothing bad would ever happen to me. Because, quite simply, it's impossible to open oneself up to the glories of life without also being vulnerable to harm. In order to live the sort of double-bubble-wrapped sort of existence that would make gran breathe easy, I would also have to completely insulate myself from anything good and fun and new and inspiring. Because the reality is that if you run around on the playground long enough, you're going to trip and fall and skin your knee. That's just life.

Of course, I no more relish the thought of stubbing my metaphorical toes than anyone else does. Like any human, I flinch from pain and flee toward reward. That's just human nature. But getting sick builds our immune system. Heartbreak teaches us about the ins and outs of love and helps us make better choices next time. Standing up means falling down. Over and over and over again. But the view from up here beats the view from down there by a long shot, so we keep on getting back up knowing that sooner or later we're going to end up on our bottoms again, dusting gravel off our behinds and cursing gravity like it was some implacable foe rather than a fried that helps us keep our feet on the ground and our heads pointed toward the stars.

I know that if I want to taste all of life in it's raw, unfiltered state I can't protect myself from the possibility of swallowing the occasional bitter bite. But what gran doesn't seem to understand is that that's okay. That's part of life. You just swallow hard, grab a drink of water to get the taste out of your mouth, take a deep breath and go right back to the table.

The only alternative is to get all upset and go sit in the corner, preferring to starve yourself of life rather than risk hitting another bitter spot. I don't know, but I suspect that's what happened to gran somewhere down the line.

Not me. I love life too much to let "Be careful!" become my mantra, as it has become my grandmother's. Growing up in this environment of fear, I had to work hard to rid myself of it. And now that I have, I refuse to let fear motivate my actions and direct my decisions - I won't step away from the banquet simply because some of the dishes aren't to my liking or are even potentially dangerous. Neither should you.

So, ta for now. I've got a whole plate full of life going cold on me while I type. And, uh, do me a favor? Try not to be too careful out there, will you?

Mmmmmm...Thin Mint Girl Scout cookies. What more is there to say?