greed morals family duty societal duty national duty international duty common laws of moral decency irrespective of religious or civic obligations and beliefs one person can make a difference skating a thin edge

"Greed is good" was the favorite expression and creed of life for Michael Douglas's arch 1980's tycoon character in 'Wall Street'. It was said out loud and out proud as if something that was to be prized or sought after as a badge of honor.

One of the reasons I left Dell was because I don't like lying to customers. I don't like forcing crappy extended sales plans on people on things they will most likely never use them on. Everyone is on a budget. Not everyone is smart enough to realize whether or not they need some shitty warranty. Because Dell is in the technology game, it's a closed arena to many of the public. By that I mean that people have to trust the 'experts'. The guy who trained me on the sales floor used to say to customers " Sir/Madam, I'm the expert and I'm telling you that you do need X,Y and Z". The public trusts experts. And people, whilst so advanced on some levels and so modern in thinking in so many arenas still trust the 'experts' because they can be blinded by techno-speak. And so In a job where margins are cut so thinly, it's up to the cheap to produce and expensive to buy services and products to make up for the aggressive price stances to stay competitive.

Now, what that means is that when you're selling to the average family (in home sales) or the average small business that they are reling on you to tell them what they need. What traditional societal values tell us is to tell the truth. Sell them what they need and don't be greedy. They'll come back if you're honest with them. But modern cut-throat business practices says lie lie lie. They may couch it as persuading YOU that they need it. Here are seven reasons why they should buy the extended sales plan. Here are reasons why you should sell it on finance. Go on, pass these reasons on to the customer and everyone wins, hurrah, cake and lemonade for all!

But those reasons are lies. The only truth the company has is that it is an insatiable beast designed to please mammon, the god of greed. Why do we really sell warranties? Because we want to provide superior after point of sale customer service? Not at all. It's because it's an invisible item that is just pure profit. Why do we want finance? Because it's asking the customer to pay more than they would pay up-front.

So we lie. Some of the sales-people lie to themselves to feel better about that general sense of moral erosion going on inside themselves. But at the end of the day, it's all about lying. And I don't like lying lke that. I don't like having to make my wages by lying to people who trust me.

And many people are out there who realize all this but then blame modern society for it. Ah well, it's naive to think that anyone can get by by being honest and having a genuine set of moral standards anymore. There is also the shark defence. Society is tough and people ought to be able to defend themselves. If they don't, well, hey, too bad. The third defence is that someone else will rip them off so hey, why not get them first. Why not?!!

And it's not just Dell but it's obviously a huge flawed problem at the heart of capitalism that promotes greed and lying as useful tools to have in one's skill-set. But can modern society thrive if we take a stand against the lying, the falseness, the immorality?

All these people, especially in the United States who go to church, contribute to causes, help with Hurricane Katrina victims and generally act like good citizens, but at work they lie lie lie and make other people give away their hard earned money out of panic and fear.

Where is the answer? Is there a happy medium? Can we work in the modern sales workforce and still have a conscience? Should we?

( it just struck me in the course of a conversation that the movie 'Highlander' had a lot of gay subtexts- how come I didn't notice any of this before?)

( Read more... )


I know, I know- this is all just musing and obviously reading more into the script than was intended, but a few salient points add to the strength of the argument if anyone wants to play Devil's advocate with this one. (Socrates: let the weaker argument defeat the stronger)

The lines in the police station when the patrol officer harrasses McCloud : " Are you a faggot, nash?"
to which McCloud replies "Why, Garfield? Are you cruising for a piece of ass?"

Kurgan has his eye on McCloud before the battle and cautions his men to leave him be with the line "The boy is mine"

When Connery's character first appears, he interrupts Connor's sex with Heather and appears wearing makeup and a fancy outfit with a feather in his hat.

Whilst Ramirez is explaining to McCloud about his immortality he mentions that immortals cannot have children.

( In an email back and forth with Joe, this issue came up so this partially answers it at least- anyone else have any input on this, feel free to contribute)



Magick
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

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Magick is an alternate spelling of magic, coined by Aleister Crowley to differentiate 'the true science of the Magi from all its counterfeits'. Although it is widely believed that this meant distinguishing genuine magic from stage magic, there is no evidence that Crowley intended this interpretation. Crowley got the inspiration for the spelling from its usage by the famous English magician John Dee. His definition treats magic in the context of the paranormal and magic in the context of religion as special cases.

Crowley defined magick as "the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with the will". By this, he included "mundane" acts of will as well as ritual magic. In Magick in Theory and Practice, Chapter XIV, Crowley says:

What is a Magical Operation? It may be defined as any event in nature which is brought to pass by Will. We must not exclude potato-growing or banking from our definition. Let us take a very simple example of a Magical Act: that of a man blowing his nose.

energies of fiction, creation, elements of transfigurative energy.

writing some of the notions stories (see my links) i felt severely drained afterwords and also bizarrely set apart, almost as if some stories or the energies required / contained within the story ideas were physically coiled up inside my head and were released out o fme when the stories were written. With things like the monkey gospels, there was a definite release/exhaustion energy going on and those stories felt much more like i was just the vessel for a story concept or idea energy to travel through to be made real via fiction.

Grant and Warren Ellis have touched upon the idea of the possibility of interacting with a fictional reality from our world and it raises the point of how much energy is unleashed when an idea goes from one;s mind into a fictional state or reality, surely there is some conceptual energetic framework whereupon the scale and power of said energy can be measured and perhaps harnessed?

there are no coincidences. ( Read more... )

both grant and warren explore in brilliant mind-blowing ways the concept of reality as fiction; grant in 'animal man', ' the mystery play', ' the invisibles' and the murky brilliance of ' the filth' and warren ellis in ' planetary' , especially in the superb ideas of ' planet fiction'.

if we write reality as fiction are we fictionalizing reality or are we making fiction more real; how is fiction made more ' authentic' or viable? how is reality made more 'fictional' and how can we explore these ideas and questions through the medium and study of magick?

can we perhaps unlock parts of ourselves through a fictional interrogation or analysis of self through a mapping of a point of ourselves onto a fictional graph with which we can chart our selves ( shells/complex collections) against various benchmarks. ?

as grant explored in 'the invisibles' as well as many of his other works, the idea of the personality is a mutable one. we are not ourselves, a notion that was very popular in the 1950' sand 1960's with their cold war paranoia, exploration of psychic para-psychology personality as a programmable ( and thereby by implication, also erasable) concept. we are acted upon by so many external influences that we need to be able to decode, deconstruct and ultimately decipher our own layers to ourselves and how our personality scaffolding can be observed, layer by independant layer. to know who we are is part of our journey in becoming a part of magickal consciousness. and part of knowing who we are is knowing 'which' who we are at any given time and how each 'me' functions as part of a greater whole of our own ' memeplexes' and within any other co-relations with external influences.

do parts of our overall layered and stitched selves interact with other people's specific layers or complexes or do we interact on an 'overall' basis? and can we break down our existing personality without suffering the trauma of ultimate existential dread and fear of loss of self and confusion of identity? Can we make it through the preliminary stress of realizing what each of our layers or complexes are in order to separate them out and rebuild ourselves as a more true or 'current' collection of complexes. can we sacrifice the present through getting over the past in order to make a more authentic future self or complex shell for us to inhabit and take upon ourselves our personal power?

magick will give you what you want and what you need to take out of it, from it or put back into it. it is at once us and the other; it is everything we are and can be and it is simultaneously all that we are not and cannot ever be. it contains the all within us but does not let us be the all.

to understand magick, one has to approach understanding itself and become a state of self-enriched enlightenment that will unlock our own ways and means to interact with the magickal reality that is around us and within us. we must shed our old selves in order to become the new self-created/discovered/sculpted persona. we must see the future being shaped out of the present through the pressures of the past. we must let ourselves be reformed without stopping us being our true essential selves.

magick is effecting influence upon external events by the application of a person's will - also can be seen as the acting upon the objective result to bring it in line with the subjective desire.

magick is realizing the power and the potential that there is within and without us and how our sense of self and self perception can change and control those realizations and channel them into our process of being and becoming and knowing what the magickal power surrounding us all is capable of.

(preliminary notes)

one preliminary step in terms of creating one's own guide to the path of self-realization is to undergo the ' treating of everthing within a day as an act of magickal consciousness' to help free the mind and soul of restraints and conventional strait-jacketed thinking processes. within these days, one practices some of one's ongoing growing meditative/contemplative skills within an overall larger relationship to all fremework by letting the universe breathe through us.

we stop interpreting, translating, supposing, imposing, shrinking down and decoding information being shot to our brain every second of every day and we allow our presences to interact freely, powerfully, naturally with what surrounds us. we slow down, we breathe in, we focu on nothing so that nothing can focus on us and we let the world talk to us, talk through us, we let everything show us what it will without us putting a tired shape on everything.

we listen instead of talking; we accept instead of refusing; we observe and do not judge or try to measure. and the old powerful voices speak to us loud and cleary as do the new young energetic ones. and we soak up what the world is showing us and thank it for sharing.

we become aware and shed our false caged persona. we begin to be; we begin to understand what it is to walk and think through magickal consciousness.

H.Keith Henson: A meme survives in the world because people pass it on to other people, either vertically to the next generation, or horizontally to our fellows. This process is analogous to the way willow genes cause willow trees to spread them, or perhaps closer to the way cold viruses make us sneeze and spread them.

Peter J. Vajk: It is important to note here that, in contrast to genes, memes are not encoded in any universal code within our brains or in human culture. The meme for vanishing point perspective in two-dimensional art, for example, which first appeared in the sixteenth century, can be encoded and transmitted in German, English or Chinese; it can be described in words, or in algebraic equations, or in line drawings. Nonetheless, in any of these forms, the meme can be transmitted, resulting in a certain recognizable element of realism which appears only in art works executed by artists infected with this meme.

Heith Michael Rezabek: My favorite example of a crucial meme would be "fire" or more importantly, "how to make a fire." This is a behavioral meme, mind you, one which didn't necessarily need a word attached to it to spring up and spread, merely a demonstration for another to follow. Once the meme was out there, it would have spread like wildfire, for obvious reasons... But when you start to think of memes like that -- behavioral memes -- then you can begin to see how language itself, the idea of language, was a meme. Writing was a meme. And within those areas, more specific memes emerged.

Lee Borkman: Memes, like genes, vary in their fitness to survive in the environment of human intellect. Some reproduce like bunnies, but are very short-lived (fashions), while others are slow to reproduce, but hang around for eons (religions, perhaps?). Note that the fitness of the meme is not necessarily related to the fitness that it confers upon the human being who holds it. The most obvious example of this is the "Smoking is Cool" meme, which does very well for itself while killing off its hosts at a great rate.

my mind has been hopping since reading Warren Ellis's Global Frequency trade the other day; usually don't have this much mental feedback with his stuff; that's more Grant Morrison territory with his hyper-sigilism ( every time I read the Invisibles, it infects me for at least a week afterwards) and deliberate memetic imprinting.

So a bit of research and I'm learning from this; yesterday I put up some posts about LeParkour running and today, putting up some info on Memetic mind structures.

Meme (pron. meem): A contagious information pattern that replicates by parasitically infecting human minds and altering their behavior, causing them to propagate the pattern. (Term coined by Dawkins, by analogy with "gene".) Individual slogans, catch-phrases, melodies, icons, inventions, and fashions are typical memes. An idea or information pattern is not a meme until it causes someone to replicate it, to repeat it to someone else. All transmitted knowledge is memetic.

( And the man who many regard as the coiner of the term- Richard Dawkins)

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leading from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain.
Memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind, you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking -- the meme for, say, 'belief in life after death' is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of people all over the world.

(if lj had been around in the 1800's)

Part the one: India and the Raj

From personal journal of Colonel Albert J Fotherington June 30th 1872

(morning): We arrived last night at the train station of Katahlandu, only to be greeted by a wild-eyed Indian chap who informed us that a man-eating tiger had been spotted the last few nights, prowling hungrily around the army compound. As if the blasted heat and the weak stomachs of some of the new troops wasn't bad enough, then one has to deal with this dreadful man in a state of disarray ( and do these colonial fellows ever wash?) ranting about Tigers in an accent best described as hard to understand.

(Afternoon): Took a stroll around the centre of operations, met all the command staff and some of the men. Despite an element of ranks blurring, they seem like a good bunch and certainly one or two soul-mates with whom I can see myself having a few rather marvellous nights of toasting Her Majesty's Health with generous libations. Captain Jonathan Carter was not at all what I expected; from a brief reading of his career record, I was under the assumption that he would be a loud boisterous character, full of life and with a roaring voice, ready to command his troops.

Instead, a tiny bespectacled blinking man with a strong Yorkshire accent. I shook hands gingerly, my heart sinking at having to work with such a strange unsoldierly like fellow. I was starting to plunge into the depths of despair until he said the following magic words. ' So, Colonel Fotherington, I do so hope that you are a cricket man? '

Hah! It's Tuesday. Well, fuck me. Where did Monday go so fast? It doesnt seem like yesterday that it was Sunday and the looming specter of Monday sat at the end of the bar laughing and cackling into its foul version of a seabreeze that used tomato juice instead of Grapefruit, looking over and sneering, giggling to itself.

So here we are at the ass end of Tuesday morning ;loaded up fuel style with blitz krieg coffee, hungry, a bit bleary-eyed and twitchy but otherwise part of this great experiement that is called living.

I need to be a rich tanned white man living in Southern California again, with villas all over the world in obscure countries with cities best known for the drinks and pretty girls named after them.

Johnny liked people to call him Stomp. He liked the association with a multiple times loser from 1950's/1960's mobland L.A.. Big Johnny Stompanato, a wop with a shiny coat and a shinier knife; stomp was notorious for his connections with Cohen's rackets but when it came to the crunch, he'd piss his pants every time it came to a confrontation . He couldn't hold his liquor or his women and the sound of submerged sniggers matched the nudging that greeted his presence everywhere he went. And Johnny thought being associated with this mook made him a man to be admired. The word dick springs to mind.

...Reena just laughed as she watched the priests scurry about the street like headless chickens. Sooner of later they would figure out the speaker's location, but by then it would be too late anyway. The Aural infection would have taken hold. The people would have had enough time to have their long dormant senses awakened. The music would have touched hidden dusty responses inside them. Repression can only keep something down for so long before the pressure either implodes or explodes. The regime had tried to paper over the cracks of reality with their warped twisted faith and now the end was near. The momentum was broken and unsustainable for their version of society. Now the pressure cooker was here and Reena and her army of radio girls were determined to use every weapon at their disposal to overthrow the tyranny that had overshadowed her world for too long.

( ala Warren Ellis...a writing exercise wherein you just take a vague idea and write it stream-of-consciousness style without stopping)


...storming across the polar ice-caps, my boots track track tracking tiny sharp holes in the cracked surface...Ferrelli coughs- a short loud bark that hangs in the frozen air and reminds me we couldnt afford to get lost...the compass is fucked - cracked and spilled..I toss it. Schubert wrote about a similar expedition in 1924, a disastrous outing that left three out of ten climbers alive and about which, the full details never emerged as two of the three took their secrets to their suicidal induced graves with them and the other one died in his sleep, with the twisted grimace that permenantly adorned his face since he got back to 'civilisation'.

Schubert whose climbing manual we all still consulted for basic advice. Ferrelli and Polo look bad, ragged tiny forms in the swirling snow, hard to see even squinting against my thick plasteen goggles. Fuck.

Three miles left and darkness hadn't even fully descended yet. We were, to quote Schubert ' In that place every climber tries to make sure he never ends up; . Again, fuck......

DO you care if other people like you? I mean, do you get offended? Do you actualyl give a shit if some nobody assmonkey with a bad attitude gives you the cold shoulder? It's an interesting question in terms of modern society. Why do some people constantly seek approval? And especially, why do they seek approval from strangers or work colleagues whose opinions can hardly be considered rock solid guaranteed fantastic springboards of reason and renkown?

The psych bs would boil it down to lack of approval from parental/guardian/mentor/teacher figures when young leading to an overcompensatory desire to be validated in choices/accomplishments/opinions. All of which is useful in terms of mapping a specific psyche and helping to explain some of the mental train-tracks ladi down in our heads, but I think that some people are just wired that way- made to please.

For any confusion over this issue- my theory is saying that in a few games generations ( within the next three to five years), we will have a sufficiently advanced Games AI Engine to generate proper God Sims environments. As regards what constitutes a 'proper' GS environment, I would propose that this would have to involve

(1) A sufficiently advanced character building engine to allow full control over character's appearance and personality traits.

(2) Sufficient control over the environment within which the character is placed/ born/ deveoped.

(3) A sufficiently high level of independent thought regarding action and consequences for the character.

(4) A sufficienty advanced level of reaction from the characters to environmental change and/or actions taken that affect them.

(5) A sufficiently detailed level of interactivity and manipulation on behalf of the games player.


In Summation: A God Sims game allows the character to be God in aa world/universe/living space that they are able to control and manipulate and wherein there actions and interferences will affect the lives of each and every living creature inhabiting this space.

Like a towering behemoth standing at the top of the week and laughing in a magnificently foreboding sense, Monday arrives and pisses all over Tuesday and Wednesday, not even bothering to shake.

My principal moans today involve outsourcing to India..ugghhh..cheap labor and people whose grasp of English is a bit slippery and a culture that promotes hegemony and a strict caste system really don't go down too well in a modern customer service based environment.


Highlights today? I have a bunch of stuff loaded onto my mp3 player which is going great and I got Annette and Paul's system set up yesterday without any need for proprietal software- instead just using Music Match Jukebox and K-lite, they now have a fully interactive environment to download music on cd into mp3 format to send to their mp3 player and K-lite to p2p any files they want in mp3 format as well.

I have the last episode of Enterprise season III to watch also- season III has been superb, gripping, much better written overall and with excellent ensemble acting- avoiding all the usual Star Trek pitfalls and instead delivering a tight exciting drama show.

Then I have the last bit of Angel Season II to watch and onto Season III; it's all about controlling what you want to watch and when you want to watch it.

Far be it from me to agree with readers of THE SUN, one of Britain's most appallingly dreadful and sub-literate garbage masquerading as a source of news, but in this case, I have to agree. Muslim teenagers cannot impose their own standards on British society but instead must abide by the rules of the country they are in. One cannot impose rules from a closed minded culture within a more open framework such as British society.


A HUGE majority of readers who took part in yesterday’s You The Jury poll said Muslim girl Shabina Begum SHOULD wear her official school uniform.
Eighty three per cent of 6,641 people who called the hotline voted Yes.

Just 17 per cent voted No.

We asked for your views after Shabina, 15, lost a legal battle for the right to wear an Islamic jilbab to classes on religious grounds.

Her school in Luton, Beds, said the long garment breached uniform rules.