Comment I left on zaproot‘s episode 048 called Truth About The Pickens Plan …As of posting this, it hasn’t appeared on their site…
Here’s the Video I’m responding to:
I love me a good conspiracy theory.
I’m interested to see the evidence of this water-grabbing thing spelled out as more than just a reference and passing the buck to one article in Tucson Weekly (which has no sources or links).
Are there other sources?
I’m not a Pickens supporter per se, but I am a Web2 fanatic who thinks the grassroots/marketing efforts of the Pickens Plan are amazing, both in design and success so far.
I’d like to see the evidence of this theory about the mid-western aquifer properly added to the Wikipedia article on the page for the pickens plan… Currently, it only mentions one source, which seems to be the same source as for this episode.
Here: http://www.tucsonweekly.com/gbase/Opinion/Content?oid=oid:113228
Maybe I’m wrong, and I definitely have no reason to side with a rich-ass oil guy…
I just want my skepticism to be smart.
Dates, Bill Numbers, and other data would really help.
The Wikipedia article, which anyone can edit, has none of this. It simply mentions the existence of this theory, which to me really makes it seem like a stretch since something so important seems like it would have some wikipedia back-n-forth going on.
Where is the discussion? If the people of the US are blind to this alleged water-grab, can you really claim the position of moral high-ground while attempting to make [ad-supported] content out of the issue without lifting a finger to actually get the word out via the wikipedia [or any other medium with any kind of reach]?
You guys aren’t even popular enough to have a wikipedia article for yourselves, yet you claim to be delivering an important message. I know it probably took a few hours at least to edit all that green-screen stuff with the pretty host bouncing around.
Who’s “Green-Washing” who? Are you helping humanity? Are you participating in the cloud? Or are you just trying to sell a cute actress to us while capitalizing on our guilt by using the whole “green” thing?
This is social media, people. If it’s true, add it to the wikipedia with sources!
If it’s “true” let’s expose it properly! I can’t wait to hear back from you. BTW, I love Channel Frederator!!! —Andrew
I’m not going to try to be an expert on comparing trackers and/or sites, especially when the folks at File Share Freak already compiled a pretty awesome list of Music Trackers.
Oh damn, it hurts! I’m still mourning the death of Oink! Please, please, please, if you’re reading this and you can hook me up with the latest thing… [waffles?] …I’m dying over here!
Anyhow, back to the blogging.
I usually start off with a ScrapeTorrent search. It’s a meta-search that searches several of the top trackers like The Pirate Bay etc… There’s also YouTorrent.com, which is also a meta-search, but I have found that ScrapeTorrent.com has the better results… At least that’s how it seems to me.
Oink, I loved you!
Kevin Kelly gave this talk at TED in 2007. It’s worth watching.
He touches on a number of things ranging from history of the Internet and Moore’s Law to the future ubiquity of Cloud Computing and Kurzweil‘s “Sigularity.“
He covers concepts like the Semantic Web, and the give-and-take between privacy and participation with relatively light language that any lay person should be able to understand. This is an interesting and entertaining little presentation. Thought I’d share.
I just heard about this from the Inside Silicon Valley Podcast from The San Jose Mercury News (the site of which, sadly, has no RSS feed metadata in its html head. Get it together, people!)
Anyway, this guy apparently made a fortune as a Texas oil man. Now he’s decided to spearhead a movement toward “energy-independence.” In a nutshell, he wants to shift our use of Natural gas over to transportation and replace its 20% share of electricity production with wind power by building out the “Wind Belt” with turbines. The result, he claims, would mean consuming about 38% less foreign oil. It would also mean cleaner transportation and electricity production.
Pickens has launched a totally kick-ass, Web2-savvy campaign to recruit online “foot-soldiers,” for his movement. He has already met with the “president” and says he also plans to meet with both mainstream presidential candidates “at the same time.”
He claims that the site moved into the top-1000 most-viewed sites in under three weeks, with 2.5 million hits and about a one-tenth conversion rate (people signing up to get involved, subscribing to get updates etc)!!! (three exclamation points!!!) In addition, he’s touring around giving “town-hall” meetings all over, and spending his money on TV advertisements.
Techno-Activism? Go to PickensPlan.com and look around. What do you think? I like seeing rich-ass people putting their dollars into making positive changes in policy and public perception (if that’s what this is (I’m the first one to admit that I’m no expert on what the best route to sustainable energy is)).
Whatever you think about the plan, you have to admit that the campaign is being smartly executed. He must have a great team working for him.
This video is an overview of his “plan” (the second is one of the TV advertisements he did, which sufficiently pulls on left-wing heart strings since it has plenty of imagery of smoke pouring into the air)
Listen to that name… “Gorgoroth” …It’s so… Viking. So Dongeons and Dragons. The following are links to a 5-part documentary about the band, and all the controversy surrounding them, particularly their singer called “Gaahl.” You gotta love that name too. I guess he tortures people and drinks their blood and stuff like that.
The name “Gorgoroth” is derived from Tolken‘s Lord of the Rings books.
At their shows they have been known to feature goat heads on sticks and other charming bits of satanic stage decor. This is a fun documentary to watch. It also gives some interesting background on the whole Satanic Rock genre, particualy the “Norwegian Black Metal Scene.” Hmmm. Fun stuff. I’d love to go to one of their shows.
Starting August or September, depending on the comments I get on this blog entry, I will begin ridding the street I live on of trash, Watertrough Road, Sebastopol, CA 95472. I imagine it will take me about a week of going out every day, for 2-4 hours on foot, and even occasionally picking some pieces of junk up with my minivan and hauling it to the dump or finding a way to recycle it. I want to clean Watertrough Rd completely of every last candy-wrapper and cigarette butt.
I would like to make a “movement” out of this. Let’s start here in West County, and the rest of the world can copy us.
I want to set up an infrastructure for helping other people do similar cleanup work along our country roads. Now that we have the internet, let’s put it to some good!
Please be interested in this. If you’re interested in helping in any way, please send an email to
sebastopolroads@gmail.com
Love,
Andrew A. Peterson, your neighbor.
Please Comment below to show your support!
The other day I tagged along with my Niece and Mother to see the latest Narnia Film Adaptation. I’m not generally very interested in those kinds of films but nonetheless, I went along. Right before the very end of the film, when all that was left to be seen was the inevitable end-of-the-show-happy-moment, the part of these movies that I usually hate the most-when everything is happy again and probably someone does something silly and all the characters laugh in a loving way; long after all the bad guys have lost the big battle and all the characters are wearing fresh clean clothes again-the projector went down. I took the initiative to go inform the management of the theater and then returned to my seat for an uncomfortable spell in the dark, while the various strangers in the room increasingly starting taking the liberty to attempt to entertain everyone else with their comments about the predicament.
After about ten minutes, the manager came into the theater and announced that they could not fix the projector and that she’d be happy to give us all free passes that we could use anytime to see another movie. Personally, I was glad because I had already seen all that I wanted to and then some, and so this, to me, was like a twofer.
Next thing I knew, I was a member of a mob in the lobby waiting for my turn to get a free-movie pass. The people ahead of me in line (if you could have called it a line), began to present themselves to the manager in groupings that increasingly had no personage of evidence:
“Two please.” said one individual.
“Four.” Said another.
The mob had gradually learned that the manager was not holding us accountable for how many passes we were asking for. The earliest people I saw get up to the front of the line would point back into the crowd and say “One for me and one for my friend…” But by the time it was my turn, the process had morphed and it was clear to me that I could have inflated the number in my party. Either the manager didn’t care, or handing the mob was a bit overwhelming. Perhaps it was some combination of factors which lead her to not question the mob.
I thought about it seriously: Should I lie to get extra free movie passes? When it was my turn, I just told her the truth. I got my party’s three passes and headed for the door.
Outside, while I was waiting for my Niece and mother to come out, I observed as a baby-boomer aged lady urged her daughter, who was about my age, to go back in and ask for more free-movie passes.
“They don’t know we’re together. They’ll give you as many as you ask for!” The boomer explained to her daughter. The daughter seemed to feel put-upon by her mother’s idea. Eventually, she just flat out refused her mother’s persuasion.
Standing off to the side, I had an urge to interrupt them and give the Boomer a lecture on ethics. The boomer had an expensive hair-job and was wearing the clothes of an affluent women her age. It bothered me for some reason that this lady, who probably went to college and likely considers herself to be an intelligent person, would be urging her daughter to pull off some petty little act of dishonesty like this. I didn’t intervene, and when the daughter finally put her foot down to her mother’s idea, I felt proud of her. It was as if we were kin in some sort of battle between generations.
Movie theaters don’t make money on admission to films. My understanding is that this is a fairly universal truth here in the states. They make their money on selling concessions which is why, for one, a soft drink costs about $4, and two, they wont let you have a cup of tap water if you ask for one. The theaters generally break even on the admission after paying the studious such a high cost to “rent” the films. Following this line of thinking, it is quite possible that the theater would make even more money from us on popcorn and soda if we were to come back and see two free movies when you compare it to how much money they would make in concessions if we were only given one free movie pass each, since the films that are playing in each theater are going to be playing there regardless of whether or not anyone is watching them, and since after the first week a film runs, attendance tends to be fairly low anyhow.
My reason, however, for refusing to lie to the manager of the theater, has nothing to do with the theater’s profit.
My reasoning is this: If at some point during the night, the theater manager was able to see that the number of passes given out was higher than the number of tickets sold, it would say to her “Some of those people lied.” On the other hand, if the number were the same it would say to her “None of those people lied to me to get a free ticket.” I believe that it is possible to change the way people think they should behave. If you consider that the manager herself, may have been someone who would lie to get a free-movie pass, or commit some other such trivial scam, you may want to consider also, that perhaps the reason she believes this is appropriate is because she witnesses this kind of thing being acted out by other people. On the other hand, if she had the experience of witnessing an entire mob of people waiting to get free-movie passes, none of whom decided to lie about what was owed to them, perhaps she would begin to believe that the world wasn’t so full of liars. Perhaps she would even change her behavior to be more in keeping of what the status quo seems to her to be.
I believe that people are always learning how to behave. I believe that our behavior toward one another, either constructive or destructive, has an effect on the values of the other members of our communities. It is easy to make one person at a time think that the community is filled with liars, thieves, and otherwise selfish people. Just lie to them, steal from them, or cut them off in traffic. On the other hand, every interaction we have with another human being is an opportunity to undo some of the damage and cynicism that’s already out there.
Think about it.
For years, my good friend Chris Phillips has dazzled me with his countless stories about his adventures. He is Bipolar and/or Schizoaffective since his first psychotic break in his early twenties or so. Because of this, his stories are nicely sprinkled with demons and divinity, loonie-bins, jails, vagrancy, magic, intuition and desperation, but through his pleasant approach to looking at his life, and the down-to-earth, articulate and even comical approach to his story-telling, there is always a sense of hope or connection in his stories, sometimes directly, and sometimes through his observations about people and the forgiveness he has had to maintain (for himself as well as the world around him), I suspect in order to survive.
I’m bringing this up because he called me the other night and told me that he has begun to write his own life story. He’s blogging about the events of his life over at ChrisThomasPhillips.WordPress.com.
This stuff is so fun to read! One of the first ones he posted is about trying to have sex with his mother’s house plants. Really. It’s interesting stuff–strange, but also very funny and very relatable. You should go check it out.
I met Chris ten or more years ago at the beginning of one of his most recent manic episodes. He wasn’t fun to be around because he would never shut up about the shamanism he was pursuing and a bunch of other really annoying and over-done, overzealous baloney. I didn’t know at the time that I was seeing him in a manic state. I thought he was just an extremely high-energy person. He disappeared from our house for a while during during the peak of his mania and soon after, I observed the severe depression he went through on the other side of his cycle. He was sleeping on a couch in our garage, barely getting up to eat or shit, and having no desire to even talk to anyone for I guess, what must have been about a month.
Over time, I got to know him in his “normal” stage, in between the depression and mania he had been going through in 1-year cycles.
A year or two later, I reconnected with him at a “bad time,” and suffered through his unwanted presence in my life as his illness was beginning to take him over the edge. Truthfully, at the time, I was glad to see him go once his mania finally carried him off on some random adventure, leading ultimately to a mental hospital (rinse, repeat).
But a few years later, after he finally got put on an effective combination of prescriptions, I built a great friendship with him. I’ve learned a lot about him and his Illness and enjoyed his company and his beautiful songs and especially his stories. He has become one of my dearest friends and I wouldn’t trade him for anything. I regret that there was ever a time when I wanted him to disappear. If only I had known then what I know now, maybe I could have helped him. But at least we got more amazing stories out of him going nuts back then.
“Just as citizens of a nation must be educated about their rights to ensure that they are protected and upheld, so too must those who compose words and music know the rights that support their own acts of creation. Without these rights, which directly emanate from the U.S. Constitution, many who dream of focusing their talents and energies on music creation would be economically unable to do so – an outcome that would diminish artistic expression today and for future generations.At this time, when so many forces are seeking to diminish copyright protections and devalue artistic expression, this Bill of Rights for Songwriters and Composers looks to clarify the entitlements that every music creator enjoys.
- We have the right to be compensated for the use of our creative works, and share in the revenues that they generate.
- We have the right to license our works and control the ways in which they are used.
- We have the right to withhold permission for uses of our works on artistic, economic or philosophical grounds.
- We have the right to protect our creative works to the fullest extent of the law from all forms of piracy, theft and unauthorized use, which deprive us of our right to earn a living based on our creativity.
- We have the right to choose when and where our creative works may be used for free.
- We have the right to develop, document and distribute our works through new media channels – while retaining the right to a share in all associated profits.
- We have the right to choose the organizations we want to represent us and to join our voices together to protect our rights and negotiate for the value of our music.
- We have the right to earn compensation from all types of “performances,” including direct, live renditions as well as indirect recordings, broadcasts, digital streams and more.
- We have the right to decline participation in business models that require us to relinquish all or part of our creative rights – or which do not respect our right to be compensated for our work.
- We have the right to advocate for strong laws protecting our creative works, and demand that our government vigorously uphold and protect our rights.”
DOWNLOAD DIRECTLY HERE (.zip file)
TORRENT IS HERE Please seed as long as you can. No need to worry about the RIAA because this is totally legal.
If you want more information and future releases from The Golden Pastime send an email to
golden pastime at g mail dot com
and put “TGP MUSIC” in the subject.
Lots more music is on the way!
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