Reading Week has seriously cut into my slack. However, today I polished off the bulk of the most urgent work, meaning that over the next few days I can slow my pace and do some casual reading for my term papers. I think I'm going to set aside Saturday as a wake and bake day, but I might go back on that.
We went to the mall yesterday to get Tara some Valentine's chocolates from Godiva, and we had lunch in the food court. I decided it had been long enough since the last time I'd had poutine, so I got some from New York Fries. I can imagine myself getting a craving for it after we leave here, but it's a craving I think I can squash with something like chili cheese fries. If I ever open up a diner in the States, I'll put poutine on the menu. It seems right up the alley of the American diet, and I think I can live with attempting to cram one more salty treat into America's already bloated snack hole.
Now for more random stuff:
I don't like combining anarchism with communalism (or syndicalism, or any of those other descendants of Marxist thought) because anything organized around communities or societies continues to deal with granfalloons. An anarcho-communist basically just wants to shift around the granfalloons and create a new granfalloon with different words. SHe argues against the Establishment's granfalloon with Hir own. What this means past the Bokonism: communal anarchism locks itself into a game of myths and fables with the established state, with no path outside. Anarchism which places the individual at the center can freely deal in the language of nature. Individualist anarchism makes clear power dynamics, how they work, and what's at stake without an elaborate coating of "class struggle" to make it go down easier. I'm not interested in working a machine lathe for the good of the people, and I don't think anyone should feel compelled or actually be compelled to work a machine lathe for the good of the people. I think technology can free us of most of manual labor, but that's an entirely different rant. In short, I want the resources at my disposal to talk outside of the social lies that hold government together, and I'd ultimately like to figure out what holds us together in the state of nature (given that primates are social animals).
Budd Hopkins is a main figure in alien abduction literature. He's worked with many abductees, runs support groups, and performs hypnotic regression in order to help people deal with their abduction experiences. In debunking him, CSICOP very quickly notes that Hopkins has no training or certification as hypno-therapist; in fact, he's an artist. His biases, according to CSICOP, cause him to lead abductees into creating more elaborate accounts of their abduction while they are under hypnosis. In hypnosis, this is a well-known phenomenon. However, CSICOP conveniently leaves a few other facts. Here's what they don't want you know: Budd Hopkins did not initially perform any inductions himself. Instead, he contracted licensed hypno-therapists to perform the inductions. Some of these people did not believe in alien abduction at all. Furthermore, the first hypno-therapist who inducted the Hills (of the famous Betty and Barney Hill abduction) did not believe in alien abduction and asserted that the Hills' story could not conform to fact. Despite this, the Hills stuck to their story under hypnosis. Also, the "Bolero Shield" explanation for the Hills' description of the aliens holds less water when one considers that the Hills did not like or watch sci-fi shows like the Outer Limits. I think it holds even less water when considering that one of the first explanations for the incident had to do with a psychotic episode brought on by stress related to the Hills' interracial marriage. (They'll come up with ANYTHING to not believe in aliens.)
We went to the mall yesterday to get Tara some Valentine's chocolates from Godiva, and we had lunch in the food court. I decided it had been long enough since the last time I'd had poutine, so I got some from New York Fries. I can imagine myself getting a craving for it after we leave here, but it's a craving I think I can squash with something like chili cheese fries. If I ever open up a diner in the States, I'll put poutine on the menu. It seems right up the alley of the American diet, and I think I can live with attempting to cram one more salty treat into America's already bloated snack hole.
Now for more random stuff:
I don't like combining anarchism with communalism (or syndicalism, or any of those other descendants of Marxist thought) because anything organized around communities or societies continues to deal with granfalloons. An anarcho-communist basically just wants to shift around the granfalloons and create a new granfalloon with different words. SHe argues against the Establishment's granfalloon with Hir own. What this means past the Bokonism: communal anarchism locks itself into a game of myths and fables with the established state, with no path outside. Anarchism which places the individual at the center can freely deal in the language of nature. Individualist anarchism makes clear power dynamics, how they work, and what's at stake without an elaborate coating of "class struggle" to make it go down easier. I'm not interested in working a machine lathe for the good of the people, and I don't think anyone should feel compelled or actually be compelled to work a machine lathe for the good of the people. I think technology can free us of most of manual labor, but that's an entirely different rant. In short, I want the resources at my disposal to talk outside of the social lies that hold government together, and I'd ultimately like to figure out what holds us together in the state of nature (given that primates are social animals).
Budd Hopkins is a main figure in alien abduction literature. He's worked with many abductees, runs support groups, and performs hypnotic regression in order to help people deal with their abduction experiences. In debunking him, CSICOP very quickly notes that Hopkins has no training or certification as hypno-therapist; in fact, he's an artist. His biases, according to CSICOP, cause him to lead abductees into creating more elaborate accounts of their abduction while they are under hypnosis. In hypnosis, this is a well-known phenomenon. However, CSICOP conveniently leaves a few other facts. Here's what they don't want you know: Budd Hopkins did not initially perform any inductions himself. Instead, he contracted licensed hypno-therapists to perform the inductions. Some of these people did not believe in alien abduction at all. Furthermore, the first hypno-therapist who inducted the Hills (of the famous Betty and Barney Hill abduction) did not believe in alien abduction and asserted that the Hills' story could not conform to fact. Despite this, the Hills stuck to their story under hypnosis. Also, the "Bolero Shield" explanation for the Hills' description of the aliens holds less water when one considers that the Hills did not like or watch sci-fi shows like the Outer Limits. I think it holds even less water when considering that one of the first explanations for the incident had to do with a psychotic episode brought on by stress related to the Hills' interracial marriage. (They'll come up with ANYTHING to not believe in aliens.)