The other day, when I went to Best Buy to grab Tori's new album, on my way to the counter, another object grabbed my eye; on impulse, I decided to add it to the purchase. (Yes, this is why we call it the Temptation Zone.)

Sophia Stewart, black woman from New York, claims that the stories from The Matrix and Terminator were both copied from a single scifi epic she published back in the early 80's entitled "The Third Eye". Her lawsuit has largely been ignored by the press, much of which is owned by the same conglomorates as the movie franchises.

I'm curious enough to want to read her stuff and see how it compares. I generally tend to be somewhat skeptical of claims like this, just because it's so easy for different people to independently come up with similar ideas and then shout "copycat!" But if it's as the article says, then there are an awful lot of uncanny resemblences. Also, check out this amusing commentary about the whole matter, written from a meta-gnostic perspective.

The proposed legislation would require all ballots to have a voter verified paper trail, allow felons who have completed their sentences to vote, designate election day as a federal holiday, and make it a federal crime to deceive voters about when election day occurs.

If the Republicans were not relying on fraud and dirty tricks to win, they should have no problem with passing this (or at least the bulk of it). Will it make it into law? I'm not holding my breath.

Follow-up to the previous post. For those wondering what this "Gnosticism" stuff is, this introduction does a good job of summarizing its essential tenets.

A highly informative piece, tying together the histories of gnostic thought, the work of Aleister Crowley, and Gerald Gardner's creation of Wicca.

Lately, I've been getting exposed to tidbits of gnostic thought through some of the posts on Fantastic Planet and Tim Boucher. (And more recently, it seems, even Tori Amos. How could anyone not go googling for the Gospel of Mary Magdalene after hearing what she said on the interview disc? Too bad so many of its chapters were lost to history.)

It seems that the German government wasn't willing to turn the "open" meeting into a scripted event, so rather than face the questions of real people, Bush opted to ditch the whole thing. Of course, this never happens in the U.S., because you can be sure every event he ever attends here is planned well in advance to exclude any potentially critical views. This is exactly why our democracy is in trouble: How can a leader "represent" people he won't even talk to?

After my little resumption of job hunting today, I got to thinking. Sending out resumes is a lot like playing the lotto. You have your little ticket, which you hope is going to help you find riches, but it's really all a game of chance, with the odds weighted significantly against you.

Here's the deal: I'm sick of living with my parents. I'm sick of having no money, and watching the credit card balance creep gradually up. (No interest to pay until next year, but still... it's bad.) I'm sick of this rut that I feel like I've been in for, like, ever.

This article concisely argues that America is on an unsustainable course, and will collapse within a few years. Anyone care to refute it?

Woah, where have I been? You don't mean to tell me that Tori Amos came out with a brand new album this week and I hadn't even heard of it until 10 minutes ago? Obviously, this situation must be rectified.

[Imperative computed. Proceed to the nearest retail outlet at earliest possible convenience and acquire The Beekeeper.]

Yep, when it comes to Tori, I'm still a mindless consumer lemming. Ho hum.

An interview with Kathleen Sullivan, who claims to be a survivor of CIA mind control programs. She seems too sensible to write off as a lunatic, but the implications of what she says, if true, are beyond disturbing.

Russian police are "investigating" Allofmp3.com. Looks like the Music Mafia might be on its way to shutting down yet another internet innovation. I guess this means it's time to hurry up and use my download credits while I still can. Since last summer, I've found a lot of great music through this site. (Some of it not even available for purchase on cd the U.S.) I will miss it if it goes.

Techdirt's writeup sums up the implications:

If the recording industry actually does shut down Allofmp3.com it will show, once again, how the industry misunderstands the market they're facing. Allofmp3.com has shown that people are quite willing to pay for music online, when it comes at a decent price and in a format with no restrictions.

I wouldn't even mind paying a little more for the knowledge that some money is going to the artist. But I don't see any of the major labels rushing in to meet this market. So much for "supply and demand".

"A Collective Manual-in-progress for Outliving Civilization." The following quote from the introduction got me thinking:

For many people, the word civilization calls to mind words like "refined, safe, convenient, modern, advanced, polite, enlightened and sophisticated." Of course, these words are the words that civilized people use to describe themselves. For example, if you look up the word "Christian" in the thesaurus, you will find words like "fair, good, high-principled, honourable, humane, noble, right, virtuous" and other words that Christians might use to describe themselves, but which hardly apply to the Crusades, the Witch-Burnings, or other such atrocities carried out by self-described Christians.

For a more unbiased definition of civilization, we can consider historian Lewis Mumford’s use of the word civilization "to denote the group of institutions that first took form under kingship. Its chief features, constant in varying proportions throughout history, are the centralization of political power, the separation of classes, the lifetime division of labor, the mechanization of production, the magnification of military power, the economic exploitation of the weak, and the universal introduction of slavery and forced labor for both industrial and military purposes."

Whenever I talk about the predicted "crash of civilization", many people assume I am being pessimistic. Maybe this is because we in America are among the tiny percentage of the world population who benefit materially from the current way of things, and thus take the myopic view that our way must be the best way.

Is it pessimistic to believe in the collapse of an evil empire? Maybe so, if you happen to depend on that empire for your survival or way of life. But are there better ways to live? I have to believe that there are.

Things I've done over the past few years that I never would have imagined myself doing a year before it happened:

For those with a penchant for terribly amateurish fan films. And prequels. Oh dear.

Having slept the majority of the prior 36 hours, I found myself awake with lots of energy before 0600 this morning. On a whime, I decided to do something I haven't done much of recently: Ride my bike.

The role of the media corporations in the US is similar to that of repressive state regimes elsewhere: they decide what the public will and won't be allowed to hear, and either punish or recruit the social deviants who insist on telling a different story. The journalists they employ do what almost all journalists working under repressive regimes do: they internalise the demands of the censor, and understand, before anyone has told them, what is permissible and what is not.

Who is the latest conspiracy kook to compare some of the more fanatical Bush supporters to Nazi brownshirts? None other than a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, who also does a good job of analyzing how liberals and conservatives have switched sides on many issues in recent years. It's not the changing labels that matter, but the behavior and actions behind them.

I get amused whenever random strangers voice reactions about the bumper stickers on my car. Today was just such a day.

"Defense of marriage act, my ass. We need to require an obstacle course to get married, and then there should be exams and testing for kids." --ginmar

For some reason, this just made me laugh out loud. Literally.

Do we need revolution? If so, why? What is it about America that yearns to be overthrown?

Riverbend describes the situation:

You feel it all around you. It begins slowly and almost insidiously. You stop wearing slacks or jeans or skirts that show any leg because you don’t want to be stopped in the street and lectured by someone who doesn’t approve. You stop wearing short sleeves and start preferring wider shirts with a collar that will cover up some of you neck. You stop letting your hair flow because you don’t want to attract attention to it. On the days when you forget to pull it back into a ponytail, you want to kick yourself and you rummage around in your handbag trying to find a hair band… hell, a rubber band to pull back your hair and make sure you attract less attention from *them*...

It’s also not about covering the hair. I have many relatives and friends who wore a hijab before the war. It’s the principle. It’s having so little freedom that even your wardrobe is dictated. And wardrobe is just the tip of the iceberg. There are clerics and men who believe women shouldn’t be able to work or that they shouldn’t be allowed to do certain jobs or study in specific fields.

What a hellish place. There has to be something seriously sick about any culture that treats women in such a disgraceful manner. I don't know what else to say.

What is it about apocalyptic visions that many people (myself included) find so enthralling? Tim Boucher discusses "The Psychological Function of the Apocalypse" in an effort to understand the appeal.

I think it has to do with the accumulation of patterns and structures. We are creatures of habit and the tendency in our lives is to organize, categorize and put things into a familiar framework. But there comes a point where the patterns and structures which we build or which are built up around us become so complex and convoluted and ossified that they naturally break open again, chaotically releasing the energy locked up back into the wild...

I think it's also especially important to look at it as a genre of protest literature... Those who are downtrodden and oppressed can imagine the evil rulers and the unrighteous being struck down by the hand of God.

Or Nature. I'm reminded of the song "Aenima" by Tool.

Somebody has finally taken a stab at creating a plugin that's been on my Mozilla wish-list for a long time: An HTML validator that perfoms on-the-fly validation of every page the browser loads without sending anything to a 3rd party. It uses the tried-and-true tidy engine for the heavy lifting, and prints a nice little "N errors / N warnings" in the corner of the status bar.

The downside: It's buggy. When I open the window that's supposed to show what the errors are, the combo box always comes up blank. Doh! (Maybe if I get ambitious, I'll try and debug it.) Even with this handicap, I find it very useful to inform me of the existence of errors on my pages while I'm browsing, and I can then run tidy manually to find out where the errors are.

If and when the kinks get worked out, this plugin deserves an award of some sort.

An "illusion or misperception involving a vague or obscure stimulus being perceived as something clear and distinct... explains many UFO sightings, as well as the hearing of sinister messages on records played backwards."

So... I would surmise that one experiences pareidolia when the brain's fuzzy logic matching algorithms get kicked into overdrive, so every random pattern begins to seem as if it echoes a person's own thoughts. In that case, maybe pareidolia is a manifestation of people's subconscious desires? Or their fears?

My ideas are bigger than my endurance.

The new site is up. So what's it got that the old one didn't?

Interview with John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. He describes techniques used by the United States for the past half-century to control resource-rich countries at the expense of their native populations.

Hu is the leader of China?

An official announcement. Bitscape's Lounge is back!