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qualia

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Posts posted by qualia

  2. Posted

    We may never know all the details of the mass surveillance programs, but we know this: The administration has justified them through abuse of language, intentional evasion of statutory protections, secret, unreviewable investigative procedures and constitutional arguments that make a mockery of the government’s professed concern with protecting Americans’ privacy. It’s time to call the N.S.A.’s mass surveillance programs what they are: criminal.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/28/opinion/the-criminal-nsa.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

  3. Posted

    the IMPORTANT thing to realize from this whole fiasco is that the people you vote for are simply puppets, and have absolutely no say in what happens.

    not true, representatives still have a vote on the floor of HoR or the senate. whether that vote makes a difference is another story.

    it doesn't matter who we vote for, nothing will change.

    disagree again. since 2k7 we've had arguably many good reforms, tax reforms, ndis, higher pensions, dental health scheme, carbon pricing (despite your political views it does as advertised). i'm fairly certain we'd have none of those things if the country stayed with howard and the lnp.

    the heads of parties just create a smokescreen, bickering and creating a whole big drama, just to distract people from what's really going on.

    what is really going on? agree the personality contest of pm is a furphy, perpetuated by the media to distract from more in depth discussion.

    we have other parties that aren't so compromised, but it's actually entirely impossible for them to win, because it's a two party system. these parties are allowed to exist because they give the impression that we have the option to choose a better party, but really we don't.

    2pp is a bit shit. but it only comes into play if you vote 1 above the line in the senate, which most australians don't. but still, you have the ability to avoid it yourself if you do so choose (House of reps ballot is different). there were lots of greens senator elected in 2k10, enough to give them the balance of power in the senate. however people have let themselves be dictated to my msm that the greens are "extreme" and "dangerous" or whatever, and as such their result will go backward this year. however the greens were instrumental in bringing in some of the reforms we've had this electoral cycle, reforms which the electorate has shown to appreciate.

    the fact that this is all blindingly obvious is even more depressing. people go around sucking television's dick so much that they just let it tell them what to think, instead of looking at things critically for themselves.

    lol. all 100% true.

    anyway the point is the system is not necessarily rigid, it's just intellectual laziness on the part of the australian electorate which lends itself to the current situation we have.

  6. Posted · Edited by qualia

    well, abbott is about big government, as can be seen from his "direct action" plan(sic) and his ridiculous scheme to move everything to the NT,

    just because he says he's for small government doesn't mean he is,

    as far as asylum seekers goes labor has implemented most of the pacific solution except the "turn the boats around" stupidity but if anyone thinks that will work then i have a bridge made of shit to sell you.

    abbott is successful because the media has been relentlessly attacking gillard and the labor party for the last 3 years. that's what i mean when i say the public can't be trusted to make decisions. the economy is sailing true in the face of a global shit storm, and the public thinks it's in the shits. the public say (through polls) that they routinely prefer labor policies but they will vote for the lnp because why? fucked if i know. people think the carbon tax is responsible for high power prices but fuck the feds have nothing to do with power prices, it's all the states. and lnp say they'll keep the "compensation" but keep the "budget in the black", what the fuck? how can you keep spending while abolishing the revenue source? thats what's fucked about the mining tax (and i put the blame on gillard and swan wholey and soley for that one).

    seriously the lnp is a fucking joke and all of their policies are fucking ridiculous but they get to sail in because "omg carbon tax you said like...you wouldn't...what....juliar?"

    i should say about polls they say "people" think they'll be worse off under an lnp government but will vote for the government in which they will be worse off under because, ......, because....... "ZOMG JULIAR CARBON TAX"

    fucking retards,

    • Like 3

  7. Posted

    you know how the "elites" think they need to make decisions on behalf of the public because the public is too brain dead to make their own?

    after watching australia over the last 3 years it pains me to agree with them.

    p.s. the media doesn't choose what i think, thank you very much.

  12. Posted

    (Phys.org) —Theoretical physicist Marcelo Montemurro and colleague Damián H. Zanette have published a paper in the journal PLOS ONE claiming that the Voynich text is likely not a hoax as some have suggested. The two researchers along with others at the University of Manchester in the U.K. analyzed a digital copy of the text and say that computer assisted analyses of the "book" suggest it does harbor meaning, though what that might be is still a mystery.

    Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-06-voynich-text-hoax.html#jCp

    http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0066344

    • Like 4

  13. Posted

    The full truth might be far worse than what we now know, or it might be awful, but in a way that is significantly different from what we now think. The critical point is that, because we have been provided with only a very selective part of the truth, we have no way of answering these questions. The problem goes still deeper than that: because we have only a small fraction of the entire presentation, we don't even know what questions we should be asking. It may be that we should actually be worried about an aspect of all this that hasn't occurred to anyone -- at least, to anyone in the great unwashed public. Some of the select few who have reviewed all 41 slides may have performed a brilliant analysis, and they may know that there are additional issues out there that would make our heads explode (or explode even more) -- but if they have such knowledge, based not on what they've shared so far but on the totality of the presentation, they aren't going to tell us.

    Note, too, that we don't know that what we've been told is the most important part of the Prism story. You might argue that the published stories imply that, but they don't explicitly make any such claim. The published stories represent the newspapers' judgment concerning what information they believe, via some mysterious alchemical process, it is "responsible" to share with us. So perhaps what we know isn't the most important part of the story.

    http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2013/06/fed-up-with-all-bullshit.html

  14. Posted

    As a general rule for understanding public policies, I insist that there are no persistent "failed" policies. Policies that do not achieve their desired outcomes for the actual powers-that-be are quickly changed. If you want to know why the U.S. policies have been what they have been for the past sixty years, you need only comply with that invaluable rule of inquiry in politics: follow the money.

    When you do so, I believe you will find U.S. policies in the Middle East to have been wildly successful, so successful that the gains they have produced for the movers and shakers in the petrochemical, financial, and weapons industries (which is approximately to say, for those who have the greatest influence in determining U.S. foreign policies) must surely be counted in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

    So U.S. soldiers get killed, so Palestinians get insulted, robbed, and confined to a set of squalid concentration areas, so the "peace process" never gets far from square one, etc., etc. – none of this makes the policies failures; these things are all surface froth, costs not borne by the policy makers themselves but by the cannon-fodder masses, the bovine taxpayers at large, and foreigners who count for nothing.

    http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/intelligence-corporatism-and-dance-of.html

    • Like 1

  16. Posted · Edited by qualia

    post a pic? if it's the sort of bent which occurs when you lay it down flat for ages and just the tip grows up the you have to either cut it or live with it,

    or if it looks just like it's been growing facing one way to the sun for ages you can fix that by simply placing it in the sun with the bend facing backwards (or keep rotating it in the summer),

  17. Posted

    I want you to get this fuck where he breathes! I want you to find this nancy-boy Edward Snowden, I want him DEAD! I want his family DEAD! I want his house burned to the GROUND! I wanna go there in the middle of the night and I wanna PISS ON HIS ASHES!

    i can just imagine how many high level operatives in the us intelligence service are saying these words right now,

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