Then there's the problem of Pre-Traumatic Stress management. Arguably, caffeine, sugar and carbs are a drug in their own right, but do they also get dosed up on Modafinil, pain killers and pseudo-ephedrine? So is there a real life equivalent to Watts' Guilt-Trip, that compels the Police to use max force for the greater good? It's generally thought that even professional soldiers are notorious for failing to fire or deliberately missing unless extremely scared of losing their own lives. You would expect this to be even more true of Police but it's almost as though the opposite is true. Is this difference purely sociological or is there a chemical factor?
The US armed forces have (allegedly) been experimenting with mood-altering and performance enhancing drugs for front line military personnel. I wonder if this gets trickled down to the local Police forces along with the IED-hardened vehicles and assault weapons.
]]>"Whatever happens to musicians will eventually happen to everybody."
http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/459/State-of-the-World-2013-Bruce-St-page02.html#post38
]]>This. If you're prepared to move, where's a good place to go with reasonable prospects and where they at least understand English; Khazakhstan, perhaps? How does potential climate change in your expected life time change this? On a shorter more provincial scale, how about north of Inverness. I really liked Bonar Bridge when I was last there.
]]>Seriously though, if Scottish independence happens, the pound is made impossible and the Euro is unwise, are there any other alternatives? Why shouldn't an Independent Scotland have it's own currency?
]]>Oh, good grief!
]]>Brothers Wilson, Shea, Malaclypse and others had a lot to say about the magic involved in the official monetary systems. Most of them seem to have a magic wand somewhere in the process that blesses the object, transactions or whatever and turns them from base metal or numbers into "Money". It would appear that Bitcoin's magic wand is a bit flaky. Still, like Old Lodge Skins said in Little Big Man; "sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn't".
]]>Further proof that I no longer understand economic and social arguments coming out of the USA. They seem completely divorced from 21st century reality and emerge from some kind of bubble universe that spun off in the mid 50s and is now outside the light cone of the rest of the world. It's not helped that it seems to involve redefining economic, social and political terms in the English language. Words like capitalist, conservative, liberal, socialist are now a secret code imbued with emotional content that simply doesn't exist elsewhere.
I wonder if the peoples of Outer Tazbekistania want a technocratic monarchy? I bet they'd like a guaranteed income.
]]>On a slightly different tack, I've long been bothered by the patriotic propaganda inherent in a lot of Victorian Anglican hymns. I vow to thee my country. There's no better sacrifice than giving your life for your fellow man. Etc, etc, etc. There's nothing like using religion (when religion mattered to a majority of the population) for manipulating people into wanting to be cannon fodder. Or at least, not complaining too much. Back in 1914, these hymns were well known and well understood in the UK. There's some rich semiotic pickings in there amid the usual questions of whether this was deliberate, reflected or unconscious propaganda.
]]>And by the way, don't ever suggest that the secretary who's been given responsibility for producing the product manual really ought to go and read Word For Dummies. Borderline Asperger's Nerd + Secretaries low self-esteem = floods of tears and a call to the manager's office!
]]>Re dangerous images, I wonder about QR-Codes as an infection vector. They're not fractally complex enough to be dangerous in their own right but they could be used to encourage the naive to follow a link to a web page containing the latest zero day exploit for their computing device. But that's not necessarily parasitic or symbiotic, just a disease.
So instead I'll nominate, "The Gun Thread" as a parasitic meme. It seems like every mailing list or social media community I've ever joined eventually hosts one regardless of the primary topic of the community. There should be some kind of law about the probability of this happening rising towards 1.0 over time.
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