Showing posts with label Star Trek. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Star Trek. Show all posts

Thursday, November 15, 2012

Rome Burns and the Department of Defense fiddles: US$100,000 on Klingons

HIja', wogh Huch!!!
Report: Defense Department Spent $100,000 on Klingons:

Indeed. Pax Americana is on the way out. Otherwise the Department of Defense wouldn't be spending megabucks in men staring at goats or, as Breitbart.com reports:
Research projects that have nothing to do with defense ($6 billion);
Education in the United States ($15.2 billion);
Energy research ($700 million);
Grocery stores in the United States ($9 billion);
Overhead, support, and supply services ($37 billion).

What are some of the worst offenses? Try these on for size:

$100,000 for a “strategy planning workshop on the 100 Year Starship project last year,” which “included an interesting discussion involving the Klingons, a fictional alien species who were villains and then later allies of humanity in the Star Trek series. The session entitled ‘Did Jesus die for Klingons too?’ featured philosophy professor Christian Weidemann of German’s Ruhr-University Bochum”;
An analysis of Twitter users’ slang;
Development of a phone app to tell you when you’re short on caffeine;
Pentagon research on democracy … among fish;
Development of beef jerky roll-ups ($1.5 million);
Study of why men with guns look more masculine;
$40,000 for a contest in locating ten red balloons.

The sequester may be over the top. But clearly somebody needs to take a scalpel to Defense Department spending.
A civilization is in trouble when it focus on superflous things and not the indispensable ones. It's so funny I can't even laugh.
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Monday, November 23, 2009

The Matrix as a Totalitarian Government Parable (A short and sloppy and improvised essay)

By Dr. sipmac

When a modern media production becomes a huge success with a huge fanbase, anything can happen. That anything means “on the verge of becoming a (major) religion”. Futurama has already toyed with the idea before lampooning the cult-like following of Star Trek and Star Wars (Where No Fan Has Gone Before, Episode 411). Now, enter The Matrix, that world described as “Harry Potter with guns”, where the cool women wear leather form head to toes, the remedy of ignorance is immediately downloadable and the illuminati barely conceal the contempt they have for those sheep-like bluepills, the way a politician fights for the people’s rights.

Alright, alright. What I said is not true. Neo and his dark-glassed combo are supposed to fight the evil machines (and computer programs that operates them) and free the humanity, but the fight does have a lot of “collateral-damage”, as seen in the highway scene. Looks like they have to destroy the village in order to save it. I can’t remember if it was Orwell who said that “a war must be fought brutally or not fought at all”. And what the humans do (at least in the simulated reality) looks like a guerilla war.

And, if humans are guerrilla, WHAT IS THE MATRIX? Glad you asked. The Matrix is the perfect allegory of a perfect totalitarian state, Ingsoc with an not-human Big Brother: The matrix takes all the decisions for its inhabitants: The matrix decides how and when to feed you. Everybody eats at the same Soylent Green by imposition (in a true egalitarian way), and if necessary, it could trick you into believing you’re eating something when you aren’t eating nothing, just by twitching your brain circuits. The matrix provides a nice cubicle (cell) where you live and die while believing you live in the open. It gives you the illusion of freedom and well-being while you’re “thriving” in slavery and misery. The Matrix controls every single aspect of your live while giving the illusion of self-determination we expect form a normal human being. The first act of freedom of a redpill is choosing an alias for hacking. It becomes their real name when freed.


It is curious that people in Russia, when they saw the movie for the first time, they saw as an praise of communism. Not even ten years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and still blindfolded…


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