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Oh, women. I love women and will forever be fascinated by them

we love you too hon!

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I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.
~ Mae West

Theatre...

what goes into a show, what happens when things fall apart, how to get things back together with minimal people knowing, and seeing the crowds reaction when it's all over.

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"it's the neck, it creaks under the weight of too much heavy thinking."

I'll go there w/ya rjmcbean. I've done community theatre for several years and I like it a lot.

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~~Melissa~~
"Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder."

Late entrance into this permits me only a quick fact file list, so here it goes;

Football
Chemistry
Mandolin/classical violin/guitar, sort of (by association, the music that goes with it)
Comics, games, and general nerd-dom
Good sitcoms/stand up comedy
Buddhism, not necessarily applicable to my own life, but there you go
Zoology
Creative writing, to an extent
Visual art of all sorts

To what extent extraneous and non inherantly political factors affect democracy? Does the pattern of terrorist threats expressed in globalised Western media corporations follow leading opinion polls and if so what is the relationship - where is the cause and effect?

Does the terrorisation of mainstream media lead to an increase in support for incumbent politicians? Is this a constant - part of the "race to the middle" of established democratic systems, or a dangerous game in which popular opinion may polarise into revolutionary or reactionary movements?

Has the increase in terrorisation within WEstern mnedia triggered the hollowisation of democracy at the tail end of the 4th wave, or is it in fact a symptom of hollowisation that began back at the middle/end of the third wave of democratisation?

New Orleans - Rich history, beautiful city, amazing people. To get on a soap box, if anyone out there reads this, please guys, do what you can to help, if you see any where to donate or want to know how to help, just get ahold of me, and please keep spreading awareness. Its bad. These are good people and they need someone to help them out.

That's a really interesting one - whether the collapse of New Orleans society post KAtrina and the delay in the provision of aid is an early warning sign of the medium term collapse of US Democracy - the state lashing out at others to promote psychological cohesion within which will eventually fail as the state abandons those within. Turning on the "Other" whilst the state fails is a fairly classic dictatorship failure pattern, after all, it is easier to attack an outsider than it is to solve the complex socio-economic problems within the state - does this pattern operate the same way within a democracy?
What can I say - I'm a political scientist!!

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I like to think that whoever designed marine life was thinking of it as basically an entertainment medium. That would explain some of the things down there, some of the unearthly biological contraptions

Here's a few...

WOMEN - (dazzling and mystical, but we will never figure them out)

MUSIC - I used to teach guitar & can play at least 3 other instruments. I spent about 10 years in rock bands. I've hardly played the last 3 years due to depression. I've started practicing again in the last couple months. Hoping to improve, learn, and create new things. Steve Vai and Joe Satriani are 2 of my fave guitarists. I'm finding great guitar lessons on the net. Here's hoping I stick with it. I might teach again too, who knows ?

These things as relates to tropical fish hobby..
Aquatic plants, ecology, chemistry, aquatic and semi-aquatic mosses, south american cichlids, the amazon.

Misc. interests - wildlife & nature, astrology, asian philosophies (Taoism, Buddism), martial arts, chi, forensics, paranormal, supernatural, the unknown and unexplained, archaeology, computers, gaming, the internet, people watching, ancient cultures & monuments, foods of the world, science.













The Amazon Nut...

Dude, I just got the G3 (tokyo?) dvd for the friend of mine as a christmas present. Best technical guitarists of all time, am I right?

That will be an awesome video. I have the G3 Live from their show in Minneapolis, MN. Steve Vai and Joe Satriani are usually the 2 main (host) guitarists, and the 3rd guitarist always changes. The 3rd in my video is Eric Johnson. Who is it in yours ?

Joe sounds better in the G3 tracks then anything else he's done. Alot more energy, flow and improv in his playing. Hopefully Steve did 'For the love of God' on yours too as it's the best version I've heard. I've seen both these guitarists live & have most of their songs. Technically proficient guitarists are a dime a dozen. So what makes these 2 stand out ? expression, creativity, and musical virtuosity.

I've learn alot of their stuff by ear, not books. (I'm half deaf in one ear too) I'm not technical enough to play it all note for note though. I sure wish I was.
I'd be happy to talk music/guitar with ya anytime.
Peace,
Da




The Amazon Nut...

@ the guitar talk!

what fascinates me?

People - how they act why they do things why they have children and don't bother to bring up at all. why we need things? - as in material things, why do some women allow themselves to be so badly treated by men? what will people do for love? is anyone really secure? are there real differences between men and women or is it all media hype? who controls the media? us or them?

how people learn, and why adults want to and can't and children can and dont!

what does the Queen really think of Tony Blair. how does our Tone live with himself? having read that one of our govt ministers husbands is alledged to be invovled with the mafia and the general dominance of the groups like the masons, are the conspiracy theorists right?

Fish - sad but true! do they know they are in a tank?


GFG





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Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself.
Harvey S. Firestone

"not least because I am stil puzzling over such questions as how on earth did Hitler manage to succeed to sway a nation of 60 million people to fall in with his madness"

That's something I never quite understood either. In the 8th grade we watched a movie called The Wave, it was a low budget made for tv style movie but did a great job of showing how such a thing could happen.

Shame the same thing really is still going on even though it's been said 'never again'.

If I'm in barnes and nobel I'll always gravitate to the photography section. I read Nat Geo non stop as a kid but to this day I think the only article I ever read was one on the Titanic (another subject that fasinated me non stop as a kid till some stupid movie came out a few years ago which I've never bothered to see). Photography, espcially photojournalism will stop me every time. I've always wanted to be a war photographer ....

I've also been a fan of ghost stories, and the idea of ghosts...if I ever had an immaginary friend as a little kid (and I don't think I did ) it would have been the ghost of a girl who's grave I liked sitting near...

Egypt amazed me as a kid but I never continued with it, most history actually does a little something for me.

^_^

"not least because I am stil puzzling over such questions as how on earth did Hitler manage to succeed to sway a nation of 60 million people to fall in with his madness"

well, I hate to say but ultimately isn't just that really people don't care. In Hitler's time information was limited, at least they have that as an excuse? and now in our time, I guess it is a reluctance to get invovled? well that and hopelessly corrupt politicians.

_______________________________________
Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself.
Harvey S. Firestone

No, it's much more interesting than that. Political scientists, especially those specialising in transition studies, can provide a pretty compelling narrative of the events which led to Hitler's rise to power.

It relates to the functioning of new democracy, the ability of democracy to respond to external shocks, the difficulty of designing an electoral system which permits maximum representation without triggering polarisation and the uneasy relationship between capitalism and democracy. Whilst democracy cannot exist without capitalism, capitalism can kill democracy. Also, how International Relations can interact with domestic forces to centrifuge/polarise a democracy.

Don't ever be fooled into thinking it couldn't happen again. It can happen in any relatively new democracy within a strong state. The irony of the Iraq situation is that the extreme societal cleavage brought by Islam prevents the rise to power of another strong dictatorship, creating a (slightly) better situation in the region that would otherwise exist.



Which reminds me, I would love to get inside the head of a Neocon and find out just how the H* their worldview works - I've read the articles and the books, but it still seems completed ridiculous, impractical and far-fetched.




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I like to think that whoever designed marine life was thinking of it as basically an entertainment medium. That would explain some of the things down there, some of the unearthly biological contraptions

The guy on mine was John Petrucci (not a big fan of him, personally, but hey, it's all good). I was hoping to get the Robert Fripp one, since King Crimson rocks hard, but I can't find it or any footage of it anywhere.
There was no "for the love of god", although they had a remix of "smoke on the water". Steve Vai covering Deep Purple--hard to beat that.
In any case, yeah, I wish I could play guitar with even a third of the ability showcased in their performances. In comparison, my raggedy plucking is nothing. :/

Cup, send me a pm and let me know where you are at in your playing, and where you'd like to improve. Maybe I can help, send you some links etc.

HITLER..
pursuaded a nation using power, fear, and mass scale PROPAGANDA. He had a team of people creating this for him. (your worst case scenerio of 'Marketing Gone Wild')










The Amazon Nut...

Two factors apply here.

[1] Personal charisma. Accounts from people who met Hitler personally all say the same thing, be they his friends or his foes - when in direct contact, he possessed a certain magnetism. some were swayed and seduced by him, others recognised the danger.

[2] Mass psychology. Hitler had Albert Speer to thank for this. Speer was the architect not only of Hitler's own failed dreams for huge buildings, but he provided the stage management for the theatre of Nazism. As one commentator observed with respect to the towers of searchlights and the torchlit parades, "No one even in the Communist world has since surpassed him". Speer didn't put it into words what he was doing, but Aldous Huxley coined a term for it - the herd-poison effect. Far easier to sway an individual as part of a crowd than it is if that individual is on his own or accompanied by a small number of trusted friends. Why were Party rallies held beside big parade grounds? Because Speer understood this. Thus, he provided the stage management that allowed Hitler to sway the crowds, and, while Hitler was an atrocious writer (anyone who has seen Mein Kampf in the original German will testify that Hitler's command of German written grammar was shocking to behold) he was an orator of some skill.

Throw into the mix the desperation of Germans after 1918 and particularly after the 1929 hyperinflation episode (the German currency, the Mark, utterly crashed in 1929, to the point where a newspaper cost 200 million marks - basically, the currency was worthless, leading to Hjalmar Schacht going to the Governor of the Bank of England, Montagu Norman, to obtain a loan against which the new Reichmark was secured), and Hitler's offering a host of apparent "solutions" to the ills that befell Germany at that time, and the picture starts to become complete. In addition, the following quote from one of Hitler' s lesser known henchmen, one Franz von Papen, is enlightening:

"We believed Hitler when he assured us that once he was in a position of power and responibility, he would steer his movement into more ordered channels".

You have to remember that Hitler was, ultimately, an arch-cynic and total reprobate, committed utterly to his own sinister vision for the future. Indeed, one eminent scholar, Lucy Dawidowicz, has even put forward the hypothesis (along with a considerable body of supoorting evidence for this) that Hitler planned to start World War II right from the start, to provide a cloak for the Final Solution. Combine the manipulative genius he deployed to this end, with Speer's command of mass psychology, and the willingness of many to go along with him because they didn't believe he would plunge Germany into the moral Hell that he ultimately did (indeed few if any would have considered such depths of depravity possible before the fact). Even so, there are aspects of this episode in history that remain mysterious to me, even after reading Storm Jameson's preface to The Diary of Anne Frank in which she says "Men learned early how to press a doctrine over ears and eyes, so that they could torutre without being distracted by the victim's agony" (page 10 of the 1954 edition, reprinted 1981). Storm jameson continues with the following chilling words immediately afterwards:

None was ever better shaped for this purpose than the doctrine, exalted in our day, of historical necessity, with its vision of human beings as the instrument thrhough which history is accomplished. Men exist to serve the purpose of history - nd this purpose is known to a dialectically trained elite. These privileged persons understand what the logic of history requires; therefore is is their right and their duty to cut living human material into shape. They have the right to sacrifice a generation, two generations, to the future they serve. An administration grappling at speed with difficult social and economic problems cannot afford to be gentle ... all that is needed, then, to justify an elite playing a cruel providence to millions of men and women, is that it should not be mistaken about the end of history.

There you have laid bare in a nutshell the thinking behind all dictatorial, authoritarian and autocratic systems. Read that quote and feel your blood run cold. For those who adhere to such a view in word and deed, those who practise the execution of that creed, no matter what ideological language they cloak it in, can and will use that thinking - namely that human beings exist to serve the purpose of history, and that they know what that purpose is - to justify any cruelty, any amount of slaughter. Some are simply more honest about it than others.

Don't have nightmares now ...


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

My interests.....hmmm....

(1) Cults- Im not in one, I enjoy finding information on them and reading about them.

(2) Moray Eels- I'm sorry, its something I always want but can never have.

(3) Aliens/Ghosts- I find these things interesting to read about.

(4) Spongebob Squarepants- not quite as sophisticated, but he does always seem to grab my attention.

(5) Mythology- Typically Greek Mythology, but any kind of mythology usually grabs my attention.

(6) Sociology- I'm very interested on the interworkings of society.

(7) Ancient cultures- This goes hand and hand with sociology, but I love reading about them. Especially mythological and religious beliefs in regards to the enviornment.


I'm sure more things interest me, thats just all I can think of for now. ^^

Inky

I could almost copy & paste crazyred's "must watch intensly" subjects as my own - except I would delete:-

* aliens

and I'd add

* anything on the kings & queens of Europe, Spain & England from the French Revolution going back to much earlier times.

Cheers
TW

COOL!!! Great minds think alike. I'm loving this thread!

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~~Melissa~~
"Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder."