Prometheus 6 - Random rant

That time of year

Prometheus 6 — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 13:22:16 -0400

Something for you to chew on

Prometheus 6 — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 12:09:26 -0400

This was lifted from The Progess Report. I thought it was amusing.

TERRORISM -- 9/11 COMMISSION NOT TOLD OF RICE-TENET MEETING WARNING OF AL QAEDA ATTACK: Administration officials did not inform the 9/11 Commission of a July 2001 meeting between CIA Director George Tenet, CIA counterterrorism chief J. Cofer Black, and then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, during which, Rice was warned of an imminent attack and urged to take action against al Qaeda. According to reports in Bob Woodward's new book, "State of Denial," Tenet wanted to "shake Rice" into action, but left the July 11 meeting "frustrated because they were not getting through." Black recalls, "The only thing we didn't do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head." Despite the importance of the meeting, the 9/11 Commission never heard about the encounter. 9/11 Commissioner Tim Roemer notes, "None of this was shared with us in hours of private interviews, including interviews under oath, nor do we have any paper on this. ... I'm furious." Jamie S. Gorelick, a fellow commission member added, "I can assure you it would have been in our report if we had known to ask about it." Peter Rundlet, counsel to the 9/11 Commission, wrote, "At a minimum, the withholding of information about this meeting is an outrage. Very possibly, someone committed a crime. And worst of all, they failed to stop the plot."
read more

Warrior lessons III

Prometheus 6 — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 18:39:24 -0400

In keeping with this, from Warrior Lessons II

Develop the practice of doing as little as possible when affecting things. It will require you to understand this most important thing as a process, make you understand the importance of change, timing and balance. Keeping the use of your resources as low as possible means you'll have more resources to deal with the inevitable unexpected.

I suggest becoming familiar with reductio ad absurdum arguments.

The advantage of reductio ad absurdum arguments are:

it forces you out of justification mode and into discovery mode
contradictions are easy to find if they exist
you volunteer none of your own ideas to be attacked

Spiritual armor II

Prometheus 6 — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 16:48:06 -0400

Direct Pointing
by Earl Dunovant
Copyright © 1995

"I will speak plainly. If you understand my words, you may stay. If not, you must go.

"To begin with, I am discussing both the planet and the world. The planet is real, vast, and you are but a single element of it. . . a mote, composed of motes, on a mote of a planet circling one of a vast number of starts in one of a vast number of galaxies in what may be one of a vast number of universes. The world, on the other hand, is internal to you. It's the network of laws and expectations that defines the future, intersecting the network of memory and explanation that defines the past, and the perceptions made relative to these networks. Our bodies live on the planet; we are creatures of the world. Do you understand?"

The crowd looked at each other uneasily. They had not expected to be tested until the lesson was complete.

This story is over but I'm still irritated

Prometheus 6 — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 07:53:24 -0400

A disturbing number of women have somehow been driven insane in a very specific way: they want children so much they cut open a pregnant woman to steal the foetus. I saw this article late yesterday.

Ill. Police Look for Slain Woman's Kids
Ill. Police Search for Children of Slain Pregnant Woman, Last Seen With a Woman Now in Custody
By JIM SUHR
The Associated Press

EAST ST. LOUIS, Ill. - Authorities returned Saturday to a thickly weeded lot where a woman's body was found two days earlier her fetus missing, cut from her womb perhaps with scissors in hopes of finding her three children they say were last seen with a woman now in custody.
read more

Spiritual armor I

Prometheus 6 — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 16:06:37 -0400

THE TRUTH

Accepting the truth is the only way to be able to change the truth. Accepting the truth is difficult sometimes. We often think things are other than what they are, and that desire makes us search for evidence that something hidden will come to light and prove things were the way we expected them to be all along.

Meanwhile, had we just accepted events as they happened, unpleasant as they may be, we would have been freed immediately to work on changing things.

Choosing which truth to accept and which to reject is just as bad as rejecting all the truth. We accept pleasant truths and deny unpleasant ones. Or we accept unpleasant truths and deny pleasant ones - you know people that do that, don't you? Go on, tell the truth.

How do you know what the truth is, though?

Warrior lessons II

Prometheus 6 — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 15:05:59 -0400

Republished.

Steely resolve

This was going to be a comment elsewhere, but I decided I wanted to say it out loud, in general.

The first requirement is that you pursue what you think is the most important thing in the world. Without purpose there is no resolve. This most important thing can be a person, a principle, whatever. And it doesn't matter why it's the most important thing to you. All that matters is that it's something you enjoy, can see clearly, and see coming about.

Choose carefully…your will in related areas will be as strong as the area's relationship to your focus, and your will in general will get stronger from the exercise but only in this one thing you can be unbreakable.

Warrior lessons I

Prometheus 6 — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 14:26:36 -0400

From: Seeing Reason: Image and Language in Learning to Think
by Keith Stenning
page 73

Logic makes a radical distinction between discovery of a logical or mathematical proof and justification. Logic provides a mechanical criterion of justification. A conclusion is logically justified if it appears in a sequence of steps of derivation all of which follow from the problem statement or earlier derivations from it by one or other of the rules of inference. Each rule application is 'small' enough that it can be checked mechanically. But how we are to find such a chain of rule applications is a matter of discovery. Discovery can be (and historically has been) by dream, hallucination or revelation. Logic does have something to say about discovery, but by far its most intense focus is on the apparatus of justification, and on the very concept of justification itself.

Jesus Christ, will you get over it already?

Prometheus 6 — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 00:16:58 -0400

"It's more about protection and control in the way he goes about using his infamy," said Polak, director and chairman of the Intellectual Property Group at Indianapolis law firm Sommer Barnard.

Obviously some white folks were more deeply scarred by the OJ verdict than 9/11.

If you a relative, I suggest with respect it's past time to let go and move on. I've dealt with several deaths, I know how that works. And if you're not a relative, get a life and shut up.

Men offer twist to Simpson case
Pair's legal maneuver could force ex-football star to pay for slayings
By Erika D. Smith
September 6, 2006

The Möbius point

Prometheus 6 — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 09:02:35 -0400

Man, there's a lotta-lotta stuff I want to get to today and I don't know how much I'll get to. I got income inequality stuff, education stuff, Disney propaganda stuff, race and politics stuff...

Not one bit of it has any 9/11 rememberances.

The funniest is that Republicans have taken their "Party of Lincoln" bullshit to its (il)logical extreme: Bush AS Lincoln. Which makes the Party of Lincoln the Party of Bush.

Think about that for a minute.

The meme was officially launched yesterday on the Huffington Post and OpinionJournal/WSJ Op-Ed pages. Steve Gilliard ran across Lincoln Lied and Thousands Died on the Huffington Post and asked the musical question

So, Seth, are you claiming that opposition to the war is racism or treason or both?

I saw ol' Newt Gingrich's Bush and Lincoln piece in OpinionJournal.