jaywalker

I think it is possible to think what is happening here (wrt the patterns in the dates and so forth). In a casino there are routinely people round roulette tables recording (usually, at least in UK casinos) random numbers. From which they try to deduce, and persuade themselves that they can deduce, patterns. Or take gestalt recognition. Not as an image in-itself. But made of a pattern: the brain must do some work. Probably everything we know is down to this process: so we apply it even where there is nothing to be learned.

Jules-and-Boo Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > In answer to your question, Otta, drugs make > people unstable. A surgeon would be expected to be > stable and predictable. > > Her choices of taking drugs and getting into such > a state she becomes extremely violent does not > bode well. > > Her values are obviously shot. Hardly a reputable, > reliable, respectable person. I think this is completely wrong. It is wrong on a psychological level: if I think back to what I did in my youth I would be disqualified from any profession. I have no doubt this is the strength of the recent moves to remove social media records of under 18s (and under 30s perhaps). And yes, metaphorically at least, I did inhale. Am I so very different? It is also wrong on a professional level: surgery has required people with a kind of blind in-human-ness to make progress. They must kill to cure in the development of their profession. This is the reality - see recent histories of the early days of heart surgery. You simply had to be prepared to engage in a kind of recklessness. One could make similar points about other professions, notably the armed services.

my cat is also quite good at y a a a a a a a w n i n g when he has seen it all before.

I do actually need advice about my cat ... He has exceeded 8kg and the vet is saying ominous things about social services ... But on a diet he is impossible: this morning at 4AM he kind of threw himself on me, demanding more food. At 8kg+ that is quite a wake-up call. How to respond?

Green Goose is entirely right on one point (and the illustration with Blockbusters is salient). That is, the technology of cinemas, enjoying a revival, is possible a short-lived one. The following seems likely to happen (and, as always, has happened for me to be able to speculate). Home VR will occupy wall-sized space (most houses will in fact have a VR room very soon, dedicated in a way that people, for bathrooms, would have laughed about before bathrooms). This is necessary for 3D sound and vision, but also for movement, the key factor. Your cinematic (and other) engagement will be embodied and kinetic, not sat in a chair. I am afraid it is not just the screen size, it is the moving-involvement. And also the social involvement (as the VR rooms will be social affairs, with networked avatars of the other real and present). My prognosis is that in ten years the cinema will be a bit like the video store. Admin will also have to evolve with respect to this.

I genuinely thought that the Lib Dems would become a focal point for the European ideal. Nothing like this has happened. I have found during the campaign that I have no empathy with the leader - my atheism I suspect, for better or worse; but also I want someone who personally BELIEVES in freedom of sexual expression and other forward-looking social change and is free of the constraints of religious faith.

These are terrible events, and unspeakable for those involved. However, we should be grateful to the security services. This kind of attack is now very rare (far rarer than the IRA attacks when I was younger). We have not had anything like this since 2005. It has become hugely difficult for people to organise this sort of thing (even if this proves to be from a cell from which further atrocities follow).

The moment of danger for her is that people in her party are beginning to repeat that she does not appear to be a conservative - her image of strong and stable blown out of the water "my" policies (not her party's) now rather exposed to scrutiny.

The clip of May's interview on news.sky.com has really made my afternoon. Well done to the press for not letting her off the hook.

Thanks for pointing to these JohnL (and also greatly enjoyed by those I've retweeted them to). Manifesto of Chaos Strong and stable my ars* (lmao on those posters) These will stick, but probably only in the enlightened cosmopolis.

The battle is on for what pops up when you put 'dementia tax' into google :-). Think they are minting ad revenue from the two parties. Nice one Red Devil. The Tories will ditch May as soon as they can I suspect: she is not up to it, not even close. The perils of announcing a manifesto the contents of which you have not consulted with even the most senior members of your cabinet. And another uncosted policy because the size of the new cap reinstatement climbdown is 'subject to consultation' - watch for headlines giving a figure after more pressure to come. Perhaps she will abolish university tuition fees tomorrow? Perhaps take students out of the immigration target the day after? Certainly the reinstatement of free school meals by the weekend (how did she arrive at THAT one!?)

Green Goose, you should refrain from making ad hominem remarks of this kind. They are intolerable. You also confuse legality (the power of directors/shareholders) with ethics. Neither the proposition (if you obey the law you act ethically) nor its inverse (if you break the law you have acted wrongly) are necessarily true. One can think of many cases in which both are false.

That is just mooing. Do you have an argument or do you just want to moo? For example, you might say: British voters are not captured by their imaginary mirror identifications with the 'strong and stable' leader at all. They are so well educated that they recognise this trap (to which we are, after all, all prey from time to time). They are not at all in need of containment strategies that limit their fear of economic and social flux. They are not at all insular or inclined to reactionary politics: just coolly rational and well-informed, aware of the centuries of European thought (and culture) that bring value to our lives. When they read the popular press they do so ironically. When they vote they do so with a grain of salt. Their command of detail of which party is standing for which policy is strong: and they do not vote for personalities, only for policies.

I am interested in how one might differentiate. Is it the hordes? I think partly. So I am against polio viruses, feral pigeons, rats and even mice if they become multitudes. Cats just don't: they expel rivals and control space, rather like humans. Even feral cats when they multiply are contained by foxes. And they play. These are arbitrary virtues, but they are the ones with which many of us have affinity. For this reason, a single domesticated rat is a fine thing (many of my friends had them when I was a child).

One just hopes that the demographic concerned has read May's (not the Tories') manifesto. The rabid press was in full retreat today (apart from the Express that seemed to be covering some sort of social occasion presumably as a displacement). Even the Sunday Times (perhaps the most insidious of all the right wing papers as it makes an infantile claim to serious reporting) seemed riven. The first poll since the May stupidity has halved the projected lead (and reduced their expected majority by 100). And that was before that demographic got their Mail on Sunday this morning - quite a shock, I fear, and all credit to that paper.

The need for charismatic leaders (at least in the Daily Mail age) really tells you all you need to know about parliamentary representative government on a first-past-the-post electoral system. An uneducated public who mirror a 'she's just like me' misrecognition. Not really much different from what secures Erdogan, Putin, or other reactionary types.

The truth of that is 'in a two-party system' which is also therefore its error.

For the first time today I saw a glimmer of light. The Tory manifesto was so bad even the Daily Mail had to think up an obviously less than adulatory headline (still an amazingly stupid one), and the media are beginning to report that the plans for paying for old age and dementia care feature a hugely regressive kind of wealth tax. Then there is the extraordinary 'no timetable' nonsense for the immigration limit, and the failure to cost even the paltry few policies that are in the document (which is pretty sickening given what they said about the Labour manifesto). Further, it looks like UKIP and the Libdems are heading for oblivion - the latter is particularly sad, but there it is. The polls between Tories and Labour will close sharply this weekend. On the arbitrary nature of the care-tax (and the distortions it is likely to cause) this is a very good account: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-39977559

At the last count nine cats in my street, no rats. The problem for cats is, however, that there is a specific skill in killing a rat rather than a mouse, and this has to be taught them by their mothers (unless they are very big cats in which case they can carry off pretty much anything e.g. rabbits, stoats) as rats are otherwise quite dangerous for them. Farm cats know how - so if large rats are becoming a problem we need to invite some of our cats' country cousins down (they might welcome the break from the idiocy of rural brexit-infested life).

Otta, are you serious? Have you read the Tory manifesto and its craven decision to abandon part two of the Leveson enquiry? Where people rely on newspapers for the formation/reflection of their opinions they are completely heteronomous in the face of such complicity.

Looks like the May control-freakery is finally getting the better of her. The Tory manifesto is - how to put this delicately - a little off kilter. I fear her isolationism from her own supporters will destroy her. She cannot listen to good ideas or abandon her id?e fixe in the face of overwhelming argument to the contrary - for example the immigration target to continue to include overseas students (what?!! - the great majority of the Cabinet tried to get her to abandon this stupidity). She seems unconsciously to have assumed the divine right of her heroine (Elizabeth I) - I very much doubt she would get a majority of Tory MPs voting for much of this nonsense if they were exercising their conscience. Perhaps intending Tory voters could explain which parts of the manifesto they find attractive and why?

Yes, I went for a second meal a few days ago, and we both agreed the meal was excellent (some teething problems on my first visit now resolved). Highly recommended.

Thank you for your suggestion. I am buying in the area of Les Fourmis, Les Chats. And also I would recommend Jakob von Uexk?ll (see also Mille Plateaux by Deleuze and Guattari). This is where modern thought is most alive.

steveo Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > 'So he rejects the deployment of charisma' > > That's handy what does this mean? did you not understand the post at all?

One way of reading the attraction of Labour is the profoundly ethical and human non- or even anti-leadership stance of Corbyn. As a socialist he does not believe in the individual leader, but in the community. So he rejects the deployment of charisma and rhetorical plays for imaginary personal identification (strong leader, stable, against chaos, believe me). The media, who thrive on reflecting such imaginaries, can only know contempt for him. Yet, in some sense, he is speaking directly to all of us precisely because he self-negates.