I hope that's a meta-comment on the racism of the KTVU/NTSB flub

I normally don't like "meta" pieces. It seems to easy to target the activity you're doing. "Hey, I'll do comedy about doing comedy!" or "Let's make a TV show about all the crazy stuff you run into when making a TV show!". But this was a seriously smart dissection of a bad article.

Same model keyboard i'm typing this reply, kind a meta.

Miss Janes' rockin' that meta-programming...

How many generations would it take to fix the North Korean peoples? One, if you separated the ones just pulled from the matrix from the ones already fried.

Wouldn't take long without the distortion-

The "silent" war has been a huge success already-

Distracting and dumbing-down an entire nation while toxifying them with food, advertising, punditry, sports diversion, terrorist paranoia, mindless, vapid dialogue of current events designed to disrupt critical thinking and instill a systemic helplessness to recoil or rebel....It's going to take meta-programming on a global scale to correct this fuck-up, or perhaps simply worldwide natural catastrophe or alien invasion. We could start by executing politicians on national television, that'd be the fastest quick-fix...after a speedy series of mock trials of course-

key words "IF you are a US person" which basically means all the meta data they are collecting on NON Americans is open game...

That's some funky elevator music they've got right there...

Edit: Also, regarding the laws that are put in place to prevent abuse of all the (meta-)data they collected: even if there was a properly functioning oversight -- and there isn't --, it would still be abused, extensively. Why? There are no (serious) repercussions to be feared.
Unless there's jail time looming on the horizon for the entire chain of command involved in the abuse in question, it'll be shrugged off. Hard time for the people who typed in the queries, for the people who gave the order, for the people who looked the other way.

The insurmountable problem with the holographic universe theory is that it simply does not answer the question about the nature of the universe, all it does is push it back one meta-layer.

If our universe is only a simulation running on a mega-computer, that computer itself must reside in a universe, along with its creator(s). That is, unless you're willing to claim that it itself is running in yet another higher order computer generated construct etc. etc. ad infinitum and that's no answer at all.

A simulation is by definition a model of something that does exist.

Fill in the blanks needed to marginalize any idea you don't 100% agree with. Don't stop there, please tell us what you would have done different, that's my favorite thing on this site now. It's turned into a meta-criticism site where everyone is smarter than the content; so smart they need not discuss it.

*blocked in Aus, there's a non-blocked one at meta-cafe but I'm just getting endless ad's on that one.
edit: nm cbsnews has a working one.

Radio: My favorite discovery of 2012 is "Radio Lab", a story telling show reminiscent of another favorite, 'This American Life', but with a much more sophisticated sound design. All episodes are available for free in the podcast section of iTunes.

Music: I fell in love with the New Orleans second line scene after Issy and I paid a visit to the crescent city this year. We saw the 'Rebirth Brass Band' live and had a great time. We also had a mini-meetup at the show with @dotdude. New Orleans music culture is like no other.

Music: Louis Cole & Genevieve Artadi: Highly unique and energetic electro-acoustic music. Hard to explain.

Music: Austin Texas band 'The Black Angels' - Dark, bluesy rock obviously influenced by the Doors. To be honest, I'm not crazy about blues rock or the Doors, but 'The Black Angels' manage to meld these influences into something I really dig.

Music: UK band, 'Metronomy'. Their sound is eclectic, hooky and heavily influenced by all the cool British 80's bands I loved as a kid. Goes down easy. Works in the background as well as the fore.

Movies: Django and Looper were the two films that captivated me from start to finish. Both films by gifted auteurs, one at the top of his game, the other on the rise. Great writing. Great Directing. Great performances.

Horror movies: The Cabin in the Woods (A clever and absurd meta-horror mashup) and the The Lady in Black (A classic, classy ghost story) both satisfied. It's nice that there were a couple of diamonds in sea of Paranormal-Activity-esque-found-footage detritus.

TV: same stuff that everyone else likes - BB, GoT, DoAb and Sherlock. I also got into Always Sunny in Philadelphia this year - very dark, very funny.

Books: Started a bunch, finished very few. Nothing to recommend. "Checklist Manifesto" is pretty interesting so far - it's about how the brain functions (or fails to function) in the information-dense present.

Games: 'Xcom' was a worthy update of the original. Loved all the detailed micro/macro strategy. 'Journey' was beautiful and fairly moving for a videogame.

This sums up my views almost entirely. I will be doing my phd on it from a meta-ethical point of view focusing on how we justify such violence on an individual and collective level.

Great vid.

I sincerely hope that it is just some sort of meta-art and the real point is to show that we are prone to accept anything in the name of seeming high-brow.

I would not have clapped were I in the room

For the rest of you, here's some quotes from shinyblurry from another thread, just so you know where he's coming from.

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shinyblurry says...

Since you asked, I'll tell you why I believe in God. Up until 8 years ago I was agnostic. I was raised agnostic, without any religion. We celebrated Christmas and Easter, but that was about it. I wasn't raised to like or dislike religion, I was simply left free to decide what I believed.

At the time I became a theist, I didn't believe in a spiritual reality, or any God I had ever heard of, because like most of the people here I saw no evidence for it at all. I actually used to go into christian chat rooms and debate christians on what I saw to be inconsistances in the bible. A lot of what people have said in this thread are thoughts that I once had and arguments I used to use myself.

Then one day it all changed. I guess you could say my third eye was opened. I had something akin to a kundalini awakening, spontaneously out of nowhere. When it was over, I could suddenly perceive the spiritual reality. I didn't quite know what I was looking at, at the time..didn't truly understand what had happened to me (though through intuition i understood the great potential of it). It was only after researching it online and finding out about the chakras did I start to understand.

It's an amazing, truly truly amazing thing to find out everything you know is wrong. It is really utterly mind blowing. This however, was the conclusion I was forced to immediately reach however, because the evidence for it was right in front of my face. Everything that I had known up until the point I could perceive the spiritual was missing so many essential elements that I may as well have been just born.

I started to receive signs..little miracles, I would call them..like stepping in front of a vast panarama of nature and suddenly seeing it at an angle impossible to human sight, where everything is in focus at the same time, that produced such startling beauty it filled me to overflowing with estatic joy. I started to perceive there was a higher beauty, a higher love that had always been there but I had somehow missed it. I started to get the point, that there was something more. That there was a God.

When I conceded it was possible, to myself, it was then that I started to hear from Him directly. He let me know a couple of things, and proved to me that I wasn't just imagining Him. He showed me that He had been there my entire life, teaching me and guiding me as a child on, only I had been totally unaware of it. He showed me how we "shared space", and that not only could He read my mind, but in some essential way that He was what my mind is. That He is mind itself. He showed me how my thought process was more of a cooperative than a solitary thing.

Now before you say I just jumped at all of this because everyone wants to imagine a loving God, etc etc..untrue in my case. When I first found out He was definitely real, i was scared shitless. Up until that point, my thoughts about God were all negative. I figured if He did exist He probably hated me. You see, that is what I had gleaned growing up in a Christian society without actually knowing anything about it.

At this point I became a theist. I thought of God as a He because He seemed masculine rather than feminine, and also I thought of Him as the Creator. I didn't know anything about the bible, or the Holy Trinity, or what a messiah was, or any of that. I thought the God I knew must not be generally known because I had never seen anything out there that pointed to a loving God.

For the next 6 yeears I was on a spiritual journey. I studied all the various belief systems, spiritual or otherwise, all the religious history..east and west, north and south. I studied philosophy and esoteric wisdom, gurus and prophets. The one I really hadn't studied though, was Christianity. The reason being I didn't believe Jesus actually ever existed so I dismissed it out of hand.

Before I knew anything about Christianity, God taught me three important things about who He is. One, He taught me His nature is triune, that God is three. I didn't understand what that meant precisely, I just knew that was His nature. He also taught me that there was a Messiah. He taught me that there was someone whose job it was to save the world. The third thing and most important thing He taught me was about His love. That He loved everyone, and that He secretly took care of them whether they believed in Him or not. He showed me His perfect heart.

What led me to the bible was this: I asked Him who the Messiah was and He told me to look in a mirror. At the time I had been away from civilization for a few months and my beard had grown out for the first time in my life. I hadn't seen a mirror since I was clean shaven. I sought one out and when I saw my reflection I couldn't believe my eyes. I looked *exactly* like Jesus Christ. I mean to a T.

It was then I was forced to accept the possibility that Jesus was real. To be honest, I really didn't want to. I felt like I had a really special relationship with the Father and that Jesus could only get in the way of that. I didn't even feel like I could pay Him any real respect, because I knew the Father was greater than He was. But, I couldn't ignore what He was showing me, so I started to read the bible. To my surprise, I found out it was about the God I already knew.

Everything I read in the bible matched what I already knew about God . The Holy Trinity matched His triune nature. That there was a Messiah and Jesus was it. And most of all His love, His great and majestic love, for all people, was perfectly laid out in ways I had never before comprehended. The bible was the only information on Earth that accurately described what I already knew about God. That is how I knew it was true from the outset.

So that's when I became a Christian. I couldn't ignore the evidence. My journey to Christianity was based on rationality and logic, believe it or not, albiet with miracles and spirituality mixed in. Even the miracles themselves were logical, as God showed me how He worked from a meta-perspective, and that time and space didn't restrict Him at all. So there you have it..an interesting testimony to be sure.

I am unusual in that I didn't come to God on my own. God chose me, I didn't choose Him. I might never have come to God if He hadn't. I found out later that this means I was elected..in that, before God made the world He had already planned to create me to do His will. After He woke me up it never really took much faith to believe in God because He demonstrated to me His amazing power and ASTONISHING intellect in ways that were impossible to refute. Whatever brick wall I would put up, He would smash it down into oblivion. He favored me because I stayed hungry. I knew the truth was knowable, and I gunned for it 200 percent. I would have died for it.

So I empathize with the people here. Some of you might actually be elected too, it just is not your time to know. Some are probably angry/scared/rebelliious, while still others are intellectually incurious and swayed by hyperbole. I'm pretty sure not many people here have actually read the bible. I hadn't either..I was simply arrogant at the time.

So what I would say to people here is..there is far more going on than seems apparent..if you don't believe at least that there is a spiritual reality, you're practically rubbing two sticks together. God definitely exists and will prove it to you if you humble yourself, come to Him in sincerity, with your total heart and pray. Admit you're a sinner, and ask Him to be your Lord and Savior. Anyone can know God is real. I wish I had read it earlier..would have saved me a hardship. Save yourself the trouble and find out the truth for yourself, that God is real He loves you. God bless..

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>> ^bareboards2:
I'll stop typing now and await your answer to that last question. Would you argue with a black person about their experience of racism in America?


Yes I would and I have, because @speechless, race is another thing we should just stop banging on about. It's an even less useful signifier than gender.

You should probably discard all your experiences as a woman. I've had a couple of experiences as a woman and a few more as a man; and let me tell you, compelling as they were, they don't influence my politics. We should endeavour to distance ourselves from anecdotalism and consider every issue intellectually and impartially - that's the best way to learn.

If we are going to continue then we have to revisit context, where we obviously haven't been able to understand one another. I don't want you to 'see my context'. The point I want to get across to you is that while any word, like 'boy', will have many connotations - age, sex, gender, race, power, innocence and many more, and subtly shaded combinations of any number of these; the application of that word in one context, by the stereotyped southern sheriff say, doesn't retroactively change the meaning of the word used in another context, "Dear Dan Savage, I'm a boy..." You have to think of these as distinct 'meta-words' rather than a single word that you imagine is being used wrong.

However much you might object to a perceived cultural infantilization of women, which I contend isn't a meaningful grouping anyway, playing the word-police is a truly bizarre and useless way of opposing it.