LeadFeet's Blog

Atheist 2.0

2012-01-22T12:41:00.001-08:00

Atheist 2.0, Quite an interesting proposition

Secular Humanism

2012-01-21T14:47:00.000-08:00

Due to obvious superiority of religious organizations on matters of moral guidance (2000 year of it), it is imparative to have a parrallel non-religious moral guideline. The christian moral guideline which is the most prevalant was gotten from years of debate and politics by kings and historical figures of christianity using the church doctrine and jewish sources as a base. It is clear that moral guideline derived from discussion and debate by normal people for normal day to day usage using facts, analysis and critical thinking is a better alternative, however most people are unaware or unwilling to consider secular humanism, a discipline dedicated principally to the study of ethics and ethical stances without religious influence. This is not an uncommon trait in today's atheist community, causing many atheist to feel as if there is no ethical guidance available for them. However moral guidance without theism does exist in todays world and has existed for about a century and a half with a considerable population all around the world. The only difference to the converted atheist is that it has been deemed by people as a study not a discussion, commonplace in universities and other higher learning facilities but not as integrated to daily life of the common man as many religious institutions are! I personally would like a scientific humanistic discussion in my daily,weekly or monthly routine, maybe a television show, radio talk show or even blog entry discussing these matters. I am not implying the absence of these debates happening in the world, they are indeed happening! I am saying they are not common in most people daily life either due to lack of access or unavailability and this should not be so.

Global warming lies

2012-01-08T20:28:00.000-08:00

Spending alot of time watching videos. The great global warming swindle is one of the more interesting ones.

The great global warming swindle
A

Anthropogenic Global Warming: How Real Is It?

LFTR tech

2011-12-27T00:37:00.000-08:00

I have recently stumbled upon a cache of information in videos and other blogs about Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactors or Molten Salt reactors. Very interesting stuff.

Kirk Sorenson

Tech talk by David LeBlanc

2011-12-20T09:56:00.000-08:00

One of the most memorable lines for me is the one by Mac dre

Life is a bitch, and then you die

Always put all sorts of problems and worries i have into perspective

USGP

2011-11-12T01:08:00.000-08:00

How many people are looking forward to the United states GP. I know i am,

"The team responsible for bringing Formula 1 racing back to the United States is pleased to reveal the track layout for the Formula 1 United States Grand PrixTM in Austin, Texas. Set to host the race from 2012 to 2021, Austin, Texas has proven to be an ideal location for Formula 1 racing in more ways than one. The natural landscape and elevation of Austin has allowed Tilke GmbH to design a one-of-a-kind track."

It turns out that now we even might have a second gp, so called Americas GP

It turns out that there is this rich real estate mogul who owns a bunch of property in new jersey that is ok with an f1 race, And Bernie has been shooting for a gp near new york even before i was born.

So there will be an american gp next year, turns out there might even be two of them. How cool is that?

Cannot wait

Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder

2011-05-16T12:08:00.000-07:00

The phrase "beauty is in the eyes of the beholder" is an eye opener not only to human pshycology but also to the effusiveness of beauty. If we pick the human beholder as the effective scale of the world's beauty then It stands to reason that some people are bound to find the world less beautify than others. If we expand on that idea then logically beauty is given rise to a by criteria specific to specific human thought I.e. Past influence by observed orders or systems, primal emotions , concious and unconcious desire or other indirect factors all of which can be considered as non-rational. As such if we have a hypothetical human who is perfectly rational in terms of number of non-rational thoughts being zero, it is logical to say that the perfectly rational human won't find the world beautiful or will likely not need the concept of beauty proving beauty was birthed and continues due to processes that are not necesarilly directly rational.

I assume for the sake of argument that unconcious thought, feelings and emotions and other obscure and non direct thought orders are irrational.

2011-02-20T12:58:00.000-08:00

Just thinking of how to paraphrase this npr article to be much more in perspective of the writer.

I was in my bed enjoying the feel of my egyptian silk sheets watching the State of the Union , thinking of the blessing that His Obama-ness has bestowed on this country. He has single handendly saved the country, he is like the democratic christ or the demo-christ of america or of the whole world, then all of a sudden i heard

"We have to confront the fact that our government spends more than it takes in."

"I propose cuts to things I care deeply about, like community action programs."

I jumped out of my bed like OMG WTF!! Blasphemy! This is blasphemy! This is america, we run the world. You cannot cut community action programs. How can this Obama guy call himself a democrat. democrats dont care about any of these budgetary issues. Who will subsidize the gymn memberships of all those fat women in my district. How will i make money off those useless after school programs that are cluttering up the education system. For goodness sake, I know like 5 people, including me who are going to lose money out of this. WTF is this devil obama thinking?

2011-01-29T13:18:00.000-08:00

THE FAMILY

Part 2

By an anonymous little sister of mine

It was a cold day the wind was blowing extremely hard. The family took a walk in the national park with there fake identities. Suddenly storm looked up and saw something coming towards them, it was their father swearing all types of ghastly words. Storm with his bad temper became infuriated. A tornado was forming around him seeking its victim. Luna was crying. The whole family was upset.

Soon they found out that that was not their dad, but it was a cyborg clone sent to decode the family’s identities.

Soon a flock of clones came but they malfunctioned and tried to destroy them. More and more and more of them came .Luna caused a meteor shower knocking out some robots .Storm caused rain which killed some robots, Nancy caused a malfunction in the cyborgs with her beauty , Macy caused plants every where to massacre the robots. At the end all the robots were defeated and so were the family.

The end

Forever

2011-01-09T10:38:00.000-08:00

The family

By: Hope Kigango

Part 1

Kids

Some time there was a family. It was a family of five kids. Those kids where Nancy, Macy, Austin, Luna, and Storm. Unlike other kids storm was special. He was named storm because of it. He was able to control all things ghastly. He could set of a hail of pelage. His brothers and sisters also had special powers, I’m telling you about Storm because he out of all his family had the EVIL power. Everyone had to be careful around him because the slightest thing could set him off. Luna also has an amazing power she could control all planets. She could control the stars the moon and she could also go to space with no air. She helped find life on all planets. Nancy was the girl with the power of beauty she could control all people with just her beauty. If she wanted anything she could get it with a blink of an eye. Macy could control plants. She could make vines a million feet tall and a hundred feet wide. She could grow flowers so high that no one could ever imagine. Austin was very special. He could time travel and teleport. He could go ten years to the past and the time would freeze in the present so when he got back it would unfreeze. He could be in mobile and then in Texas in two second flat. If you want to know about his parents lets just say they were the best super heroes ever.

Thank you

Your Drive

2011-01-08T21:19:00.000-08:00

To understand the forces that move us or our drives, you have to comprehend three basic terms. Motivation, Endurance, Perseverance

Motivation; What is it? What is this force that compels us towards our goal?, Why does it affect us so? According to Wikipedia. "it is the driving force which causes us to achieve goals" Even when your strength is dwindling and any light or hope is waning, There is this fire in all of us, a sort of espirit de corps in your basic nature or disposition that prevents you from giving up, pushing us upward and onwards to whatever we want to achieve.There are other queries of this Force's nature,we would like to know where it comes from, how it affects us and how we can gain control over this thing that propels us. But above is a sufficient basic definition of motivation.

Endurance; Some people use stamina and endurance interchangibly, But stamina is just the wrong word for me. Every time I hear it, I automatically think of an old man who just can't get it up. Endurance according to wikipedia is " the ability for an animal to exert itself for a long period of time" This includes mental and physical aspects of the creature in question.

Perseverance; 'Don't give up', ' Gambare ' , 'Keep on keeping on'. This are phrases to spur on to encourage one to persevere. If you are able to persevere, according to the textbook definition of the word - you are able to keep steady persistence in a course of action, a purpose, a state, etc., esp. in spite of difficulties, obstacles, or discouragement. You could say commitment, patience, hard work, but what it all comes to is that you are going on about a task or action that if without importance, you would have already given up on.

When we crap, have sex, dream or do anything; all these different events have a drive behind them, whether the drive comes from a basic need, or is an instinctual drive or just born out of random events. If you are performing any task, it is assumed that there is a basic motivation involved, you are experiencing or enduring some type of unwanted stress, as such you are also persevering in some fashion. You could go through the spectrum from least enjoyable tasks to most enjoyable, Most complex to most mundane and you would still need these three things. To some even life itself can become a most arduous task.Where does these drives for something originate from?

Emotion are the fuel and source of drive for all human life, they affect behaviour, they direct cognition, they are even attributed give rise to other emotions. When we are happy, our mind,body and work routines change in a given way, the same goes when we are sad, angry, curious e.t.c. While endurance can simply be given by a physical measure, the same cannot be said about motivation and perseverance. If you do not have basic emotionality, you would not be compelled to do even the most simplest of tasks. If you are not in control of your emotional self then you have no means of controlling your motivation, you might have the greatest endurance in the world but you will not be able to persevere through difficulty. It is then imperative through whatever means available that we learn how to always be consious of what we are feeling, to govern and control and use our emotions effectively to strive to become more rational, more logical and to steer our emotions in a way that increases your motivation and determination . This is one of the most important peices of knowledge of human physiology, i.e. emotions are inextricably linked with drive.

If you have ever seen Japanese anime, then you undoubtedly know Naruto, the anime. In this animated series the main character, Naruto Uzumaki has a demon sealed in him. Imagine unlimited motivation, endurance and perseverance at the twist of a tap. Many people think that is how humans are but they are wrong, we are humans, our resolve is determined by our tenacity and strength which is not limitless. Mr. Uzumaki has a monster with unlimited rage and power without a beginning or end , a creature born of pure hate and resolve is sealed in him and if he were to fully unleash it, he would be able to rain chaos and destruction till the end of time, or at least until he died. If you do not have a supremely powerful mythical creature trapped in a your stomach , your situation is undeniably different. Your endurance is simply a physical measure related to your strength, your motivation is controlled by your mind-state and emotions, and your perseverance is just a product of what you think of the importance of your task and your motivation. You cant be motivated to do what you don't want to do, increasing endurance is only possible over a long period of time through tough workout regiments of whatever aspect of the body is in question and you have a finite limit of perseverance possible.

I do not want to say that one can accurately determine what tasks a given person can or will do, and to what proficiency he or she will do them in advance based on motivation, endurance and perseverance, but one can reasonably gauge these things.

For example-when i came to America, I was urged to join high school track and field. Everybody seems to assume if you are Kenyan, you are predestined to be a great runner, you automatically have great endurance because of your heritage and are used to running everywhere, but sadly this is not the case. I suck at running! I simply don't have the motivation to run, or at least competitively run(why not rather competitively race cars?). My endurance was so bad that when i was running, the track coach would not let me run with the men. I was too slow,I kept slowing everybody down, so he had me run with the girls. I really did not mind much, running behind high school girls who usually liked to dress quite liberally was very nice but tiresome. They usually had to wait for me every 2-3 miles, and by the time i caught up, I was wheezing, sweating and almost catatonic with exhaustion. I just did not have the stamina, I mean endurance - for such a type of strenuous activity; which was just running.I also lacked perseverance or discipline for it, even though i was getting good times at the end of one week in the 800m challenges, i had quit. In summary, I lacked drive for running and this is obvious.

Even though, there is a way of gauging what one is able to do and not to do with respect to drive. There are ways or tricks to accomplish tasks that you are not able to complete normally. It is possible to 'go past your limits' in various ways. One of my favorite stratagems for completing something i don't have the endurance for is simply called the "bull rush","Zerg rush" or "bare your guts" strategy. Simply try to accomplish a huge part of the task in a condensed time schedule. Overwhelm your opponent or the situation you are in by madly attacking with all your resources at once. If i don't have the perseverance for something, I would simply break it down into minute tasks and relegate doing most of them till a later time. If you don't have the motivation to do something you pump yourself up at the beginning of your task with false confidence or false motivation and then plant yourself head first into your task with no way of turning back. But even with these tricks, your endurance wont increase, your motivation will not be changed much and your perseverance wont be endless.

What if you utilize all the strategies you can and you still come up short? What if anything you do is not enough?Let me suggest a hypothetical scenario. Picture yourself on boxing day, you have been working all day and you are supremely exhausted. All over sudden, your toilet is welling up water. Your sewer pipe is clogged up, So you get some extremely caustic chemicals, dump them in your drainage and hope for the best. The next evening, the same problem occurs. Your chemicals were useless, so you go to the garage and grab the plumbers snake(closet auger) and twist till your arms almost drop off. By midnight, You have grabbed some gunk but still no solution. So you pour your chemicals in and hope they are able to clear the way, now that you have weakened the enemy. At 3 a.m. You are woken up by rushing water, the water from the drain has overflowed into the carpet, so put your shoes on and splish, splash, splish, splash out the door you go. Your work area has been desecrated since someone has decided to wake up past midnight to relieve themselves even though the sewer system is clogged and you specifically asked them not to. So you are now outside, cold, suffocated by smell, You have to work carefully to avoid stepping on the little brown pudding cakes that have welled up out of the ground, your back-stabbing, evil little brother has decided not to help you and is enjoying his sleep, you are extremely tired, and also you are working in almost complete darkness since your flashlight has decided to give up for no apparent reason . At day-light, it is now raining and you are soaked but still optimistic that your twisting closet auger, will solve the problem. After all it was this same auger that solved the VERY SAME STINKING PROBLEM last year, at around the same time in the year. It is a pity that you never washed the auger, because now you are churning it with your bare hands, with the caked up shit from last year since it seems to be necessary to do so and you just really don't care now. You are now very sleepy, very tired and you now realize the auger that worked last year just wont work this year. So you go get a new one from the hardware store and continue churning the mixture of chemicals,piss and poop hoping for just a little bit of luck, but it is not working. You are now cold, wet, tired,literally covered in crap, demotivated, out of endurance and unable to persevere. What will you do? Of course you will find out later that you have been slaving for naught since there was a god-dang tree root that has been blocking the pipe, and your puny home depot closet auger was probably not even able to scratch the bark on it,but that is meaningless at the moment, How will you proceed to try and solve the problem when you don't have any drive?

The drive of an individual or even of a society as such is a very important element in being able to perform tasks, accomplish goals or even exist. Much effort should be taken to understand and utilize drive properly.

P.S: Happy New year to all.

Rights to a name, Lotus-gate

2010-12-09T14:55:00.000-08:00

If you follow f1, you would realize that 2010 was a radical year, 2008 and 2007 were pretty cool but not the same. The addition of the three new teams and cosworth engines, five championship contenders till the last race, The rise of the red bull team, the various innovations like the f-duct, double diffuser, pull-rod suspension e.t.c. made this season one to remember.
Already though, there is a scandal that is of interest in the 2011; The Lotus-gate. There will be a new name on the grid, Lotus-Renault GP which will give F1, two lotus teams since last years lotus entry will be renamed Team Lotus Racing. A good article on this is to be foun

The Lotus-Lotus situation

This is essentially because of a marketing dispute. Tony Fernandes,Malaysian Entrepreneur and Director of Air Asia through a series of succesful business moves was able to acquire the lotus name and an entry into F1( very hard things to come by). He has succesfully contested the 2010 season and is now going on into the next season with a bootfull of money, new engine manufacturer(Renault) and a mission to rank higher.

Lotus was founded by Colin chapman, A genius car designer, Seen in this picture sporting a super awsome mustache. He founded two SEPARATE divisions. The Racing division and the Car division. Each an independent corporate identity only sharing a name and a legacy. Tony Fernandes obtained the rights to the name of the racing division.

Lotus Cars, the car manufacturer underwent a series of buyouts and is now controlled and wholly owned by Proton, a malaysian car company. The company has invested heavily in lotus, It is now revamping the whole product lineup, a process that is expected to cost about 480 billion. It is kinda mad about how this Tony Fernandes guy is hogging up all the fame and glory associated with the Lotus name all to himself, and it also wants to advertise its product in the light of f1. So using a ton of money, it has acquired 25% of the Renault GP team and has
planned its entry into F1

Proton’s subsidiary, Group Lotus plc has bought a major equity stake in the Renault F1 team which will be renamed Lotus Renault GP team from the start of the 2011 Formula season onwards. With the acquisition, Group Lotus will become the title sponsor over the next several years. Picture shows a model of the Lotus Renault GP racing car. — Bernama

Lotus cars concept of it's new Espirit.

So now there will be two lotus names in f1 next year, and that is about the gist of it. This fight has dragged on to other aspects. They were fighting for color,and by declaring their 2011 livery almost a week after the final 2010 race, Lotus-Renault won that getting the black and yellow livery associated with the successful ground-effect cars of Colin Chapman. They are fighting for engine power, with Lotus cars reportedly wanting to cutoff Renault power from Tony Fenarndes's Team Lotus. They are having a huge propaganda war, with proton-owned lotus seemingly belligerent about Team Lotus and with Tony Fernandes's team under attack trying to do all it could to fight back, check out the cheeky Save Team Lotus site they created.The fight goes on and on.

Question is, which entity is the rightful owner of the colin chapman legacy in F1, Which is the real Lotus in F1 and with Team Lotus using red bull transmission and consequentially a pull-rod suspension next year, which will be the faster one?

Its like the return of the white lotus, except with F1

Wikileaks cable; Kenyan corruption

2010-12-08T15:04:00.001-08:00

A cursory look at wiki-leaks yielded this report.

US embassy cables: US pushes for political reform in Kenya [2]

Tuesday, 12 January 2010, 15:13
C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 04 NAIROBI 000059
SENSITIVE
SIPDIS
FOR A/S CARSON AND NSC SENIOR DIRECTOR GAVIN FROM THE AMBASSADOR
EO 12958 DECL: 2020/01/12
TAGS PREL, PGOV, KCOR, KE
SUBJECT: U.S. POLICY TO ADVANCE THE REFORM AGENDA
REF: 09 NAIROBI 1811; 10 NAIROBI 31; 10 NAIROBI 50; 10 NAIROBI 11 09 NAIROBI 2485; 09 NAIROBI 2483; 09 NAIROBI 2475; 09 NAIROBI 2401
CLASSIFIED BY: Michael E. Ranneberger, Ambassador, DOS, EXEC; REASON: 1.4(B), (D)
1. (C) Summary: Our highest priority efforts are focused on advancing implementation of the reform agenda, which is key to the future democratic stability and prosperity of Kenya. While some positive reform steps have been taken, the old guard associated with the culture of impunity continues to resist fundamental change. Most key reforms are yet to be carried out, and the future of the constitutional review process is uncertain. We are employing public and private pressure, engaging broadly with the senior-most levels of the government and other political actors, and reaching out extensively to the Kenyan people, youth, civil society, the media, the private sector, and religious groups. We also laying out incentives for positive action on reforms and supporting significant steps when they are taken. Continued intensive U.S. efforts - using our unique influence in Kenya - is essential to propel implementation of the reform agenda. U.S. efforts are viewed very favorably by the Kenyan people and are helping generate increased domestic-driven pressure for reforms. This message discusses the current state of play, the dynamics affecting the reform agenda, and U.S. policy and actions. End summary.

2. (C) Advancing implementation of the reform agenda is the central objective of U.S. policy in Kenya. Achieving this is key to ensure the future democratic stability and prosperity of Kenya, a strategically important partner of the United States. Failure to implement significant reforms will greatly enhance prospects for a violent crisis in 2012 or before - which might well prove much worse than the last post-election crisis. Bringing about implementation of the reform agenda poses a large challenge because doing so threatens the culture of impunity and the entrenched political class that has existed in Kenya since independence. Most of the political and economic elite (to greater and lesser extents) compose the vested interests that benefit from and support impunity and the lack of accountability with respect to governance, state resources, and the rule of law. This includes President Kibaki and Prime Minister Odinga, who signed the coalition agreement, as well as most of the members of the Cabinet and leaders of the political parties.
The report then goes on to talk of the whole Wako scandal, "kwe kwe" death squads, the joke that is Police reform and their heavy lobbying in kenyan politics

This was in between the leak on Moi's alledged corruption leak in 2007, An American Cable from Shell 's VP reporting of Shell's complete domination of the Nigerian government to the US Government and a report on the complete mutual understanding between the Ugandan dictatorship and USA Intelligence with regard to war crimes.

This report even seems to imply that the US is willing to help museveni with "problems" in his cabinet

TWISTED!!

WikiRebels: The Documentary | WikiLeaks & Julian Assange

Skip to 7:50 on the video to hear about the initial corruption leak on Moi.

C'etait Rendezvous

2010-12-08T15:01:00.000-08:00

C'était un Rendezvous ("It was a date") is a short film (under 10 minutes) made in 1976 by Claude Lelouch, showing a high speed drive through Paris.

Social Networking

2010-11-07T17:43:00.000-08:00

Online Social networking is the invention of the decade. There are greater inventions that are present like the Integrated circuit or the computer networking that are key to this tool but in the years 2ooo till now or otherwise known as the Noughties decade, The world has been revolutionized by social networking sites.

It is not only me who is of this opinion, The telegraph published a survey asking people which inventions they thought revolutionized the decade and a great deal of the listed Items had something to do with online social networking Facebook(73%), Twitter(58%) and Youtube(40%) not counting MySpace, Friendster, Orkut, Yahoo Messenger and the many other networks out there(Spacebook , adult friend finder e.t.c ;D). If you wanna really know the impact felt by people as a whole by social networking you could use correlation to find online socializing as whole, but it is obvious that in total the most significant innovation to regular people in this decade is undoubtedly social networking.

"As Facebook undoubtedly is the most infuential social network today, it’s not really an original invention of the decade. I’m afraid the trophy should go to Friendster and MySpace which were ‘invented’ in 2002 and 2003 respectively. Facebook merely took the fundamental ideas from Friendster and MySpace and made it better. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004. As far as technological inventions go I’d say mp3 is way ahead of the bunch."

Kris Olin, MSc (econ.)

Computer networking is such a huge part of living today, there are so many tools and implements that we have come to rely on that rely on the interwebz. Think of all the internet tools that we rely on, All the information utilities and tools, communication tools for interpersonal use, group use or for the masses or reference sources that we depend on.

The web as such is a great part of modern life and one of its most widely used functions is most certainly social networking, but where did social networking arise from? How did social networking come to be what it is?

“Regardless of what may be the hot social media property of any particular month or year, social networking has become a core part of our daily lives.”

Amy Kean, senior marketing manager, Internet Advertising Bureau

There are many networking tools in place today from forum, sub-forums, blogging, irc, but this was not always the case. Due to the advent of facebook and myspace, Being online is not a depressing and isolationistic prospect any more, these sites seem to encourage people to be at ease and have the ability to make, shape and spur online communities. But such was not the case at the eve of the internet. You can not say that the internet was an unimaginable technology. Even before DARPA ever created the IPTO or the first foundations of ARPANET or Telenet were created, there was a clear picture of the goal, A method that would use computers to foster the exchange of information.The internet, intranet, other networks like fidonet, compuserve, prodigy were all technologies in this line.

The pioneers of social networking on the net prior to www, was undoubtedly Bulletin Board Systems(bbs) thought of in the 1970's, initially, It was essentially a bulletin board you could get access to over a phone line. It was a big part of spawning the concept of social net. Then as the internet took over ,better social networks were created that were easier, more convenient and and gave better integrated meaningful arrangements for their consumers. It began slowly with ethnic centered sites like Black planet, community Connect but spread now to the cornucopia of sites available. Sites like Facebook, Myspace, Twitter,LinkedIn, Nexopia,Tagged, XING, Friendster, Mixi, Multiply, Orkut, Wretch and so many more.

How is social networking defined anyway?

Social networking is the grouping of individuals into specific groups, like small rural communities or a neighborhood subdivision, if you will. Although social networking is possible in person, especially in the workplace, universities, and high schools, it is most popular online. This is because unlike most high schools, colleges, or workplaces, the internet is filled with millions of individuals who are looking to meet other people, to gather and share first-hand information and experiences about golfing, gardening, aesthetics and cosmetic surgery, developing friendships or professional alliances, finding employment, business-to-business marketing and even groups sharing information about the end of the Mayan calendar and the Great Shift. The topics and interests are as varied and rich as our society and the history of the human being.

Why are we so attached to myface, spacebook, orkut and the rest of the "new" social sites? What makes them so attractive? One of the reasons seem to be the ease of use in these sites unlike other sites which leave you grappling with complex html code or need the confusing electronic protocols of past networks needed(phone modems and such), the other reason is that the more the users a site has, the more successful it is .These sites are actively engaged in the trading of personal information for profit. Facebook was for example recently involved in privacy (1) concerns due to this matter, there was the Facebook Beacon scandal, facebook app producers like Zynga, causes, Quiz planet and IHeart have all been traced to selling user data to advertisers and online trackers . The more users these companies illicitly gather and pawn user data, the more advertisements and the more success they seemingly enjoy.

What kinds of problems have arisen due to social networking? As social networking has gained traction, Many existing boundaries have simply been washed away ,pre-existing conceptions of privacy have been eroded. Post stuff online and you should not expect any modicum of privacy or control at viewership. Even though this is a huge exaggeration, That is the mindset that people are advised to go with into the public domain because there is nearly no simple way to keep full control of your information and very easy to lose the little control you have. Tracker Companies, The very sites you entrust your info to, the friends you want to share you info with, complete strangers whom you don't know,Data Thieves and Hackers who do such stuff for a living, Governmental agency looking for tab on you, Almost everybody seems to be after your private data with the intention of taking advantage of it in some way you do not want them to.

Different problems like addiction, misuse and workplace corruption have also arisen, an increase things like social networking( the fancy lying type not political science), productivity loss; virus, rootkits ,DoS attacks and malware; the number of social shut-ins(Hikimori's) has been directly attributed to social networking.

As the world advances and today's technology become optimized, refined and improved, The main question becomes, How is social networking going to change in the future?

I really don't have a clue.

A review on Social Networks Around the World

Sam Harris talks to Jon Stewart

2010-10-16T16:53:00.001-07:00

The moral landscape is a book about morality based on scientific principle. I have not read it but I sure want to now!

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Sam Harris

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor

Rally to Restore Sanity

The Need For a Higher Power and Morality

2010-10-09T20:07:00.000-07:00

Nehamashira:

I think that any society that is not accountable to a benevolent 'higher power' will eventually fall into moral decay and violence. Humans have shown time and again that they tend to follow the path of the least moral resistance. What are our greatest needs? They are to be fed, clothed, protected, and loved, and we need to be challenged to become our highest and best selves. In order to do that, we require a standard to be upheld. It is not easy to do the right thing, and in the midst of moral dilemmas, we need ethical guidelines that will help us make the right decisions. A society is best judged by the way it treats its weakest and most vulnerable citizens. Is it 'life-loving/preserving', or does it glorify death?

Some of what you say is true. Almost all People indeed do follow "the path of the least moral resistance" and rarely like to invest any effort in anything greater than the primal needs. For a society to function and excel, its residents need to have moral standards, ethical guidelines, basic discipline and on top of that a template of character that they can emulate. The easiest and most reliable service provider who if available can render these services to a society has always been religion. Take for example most societies today based on any of the three major religions. These religions always give birth to organizations which have the skill, ingenuity and posses the required resources and experience to make a relatively good society

But is it true that the only thing that can shape a society well is religion? Is it true that any society that does not believe in the supernatural is undoubtedly evil? Seriously? You say that a society that does not believe in a "higher power" will undoubtedly end up in a state of moral decadence and violent anarchism, but this is just not true! Religion does give us standards to measure up to but there are many other things that can give us standards to measure up to, and as a requirement to function as an integral part of a society even a godless one, you have to have some standards . Some people use great figures, revered figures, history etc as a guide or role model, some people think of dreams, goals, ideals or just other people as references for moral decisions. Just because a society's residents do not think that some "higher power" somewhere is looking over their shoulder at what they do all the time, everywhere does not mean that the society is decaying.

Ndigilia2:

The real issue isn't whether an atheistic society can have moral people, rather, the issue is whether the atheistic society has the "language" to justify the morality.

For instance, it was Christianity that gave post-Christian Europe it's definition of what a human being is, (a creature who has the image of God as it's essence). It is this definition of a human being that made all human life of equal and infinite value. (Of course, there's periods in Christendom when Christians didn't live up to this standard). It is from this understanding that the concept of human rights developed.

So if a 2-year old child is trapped in a building being razed by a fire, Christians have no problem believing that an atheist firefighter will run into the building and try to save him. The real issue is whether the atheist firefighter can rationally justify that action.

I am not sure i really do understand what you are saying. I am assuming that what you are trying to prove is that without god there can be no morality, since your position is that god is the one who defines morality or puts it in our hearts. I however do not think that morality is hinged on god, at all. I Think of it as a product of human civilization, humans evolved to require a sort of code to differentiate the intentions, decisions and actions that can be helpful(good) to the individual, family, community and society with the harmful(bad) ones.

This is a common disagreement with many people, you are a divine command theorist while i am something else.

There are many reasons that one can 'justify' a moral action, this is not an issue, If mad men like hitler can base their insanity on morality then it should be relatively easy for other nobler and more justifiable actions to be morally defendable. If it is in the case of the atheist firefighter, Logically you can give reasons about society, opportunities of life, blah blah blah. But the best course of action in a case like this, is to make an appeal to emotions. Because humans have an ability of empathy(which i also think is not from god), we can empathize with the kid in the fire. I don't think anybody would want a toddler to be roasted in burning building for no reason.I wouldn't want it, you wouldn't want it and this is because we can imagine the kids pain and sorrow and if we don't want to endure it, we wouldn't wish it happening on the kid.

Ndigila2:

This is where the slippery slope gets. You've identified society, logic and emotions.

If society judges creates it's own morals, then by what standard would an individual look at another society and say that slavery and child sacrifices are wrong?

Before you talk of opportunities of life as a reason for the fire fighter to save the child, you first have to define what human life is and what makes it very valuable.

When it comes to logic and emotions, if they coincide, there's no problem. But what happens when appeal to logic contradicts appeal to emotions? In the case of the firefighter, what if a stronger argument could be made not to save the child. Which one do you side with?

It is not a slippery slope because there is no natural high ground. Many people who believe in divine command(morality from god) also believe that god has an absolute moral law which is infallibly righteous or always right. But I do not believe such a thing exists. Morality is what it is because people have built it up to where it is.

I don't believe there is such a thing as an infallible moral law.All moral law is man made law and not free of wrong, thus I choose to decide on the definition of morality that I see as good. I'll then use rational thought and logic to build the moral framework that is appealing to me. You gave an example of slavery and child sacrifice. I do not see any benefit to those things in modern life, I abhor violence and value freedom and I am afraid of me and my dear ones falling prey to these terrible things; these positions I hold logically force me to take a standpoint against slavery and child sacrifice. I will therefore build and adopt a moral framework for myself and my society that shuns these things.

I will also use emotion to reinforce or make strong the framework I have adopted. If I am told to justify my reasons for thinking slavery is wrong or rushing into a burning building to save a child, I could use the emotions in question to justify myself. This is how the morality seems to work for everyone. Even people of religious leanings will have a moral framework that they choose to adopt and will use anything including emotion to keep this framework steady.

Just imagine that there is this religious order that has a holy book that tells people to bash children on a rock.(I was trying to be corteous in the forum but are passages in the bible that say to do this) Even though I am sure that they would have a meaning behind such a twisted, cruel and terrible edict, If I criticize any person of the given religion with this edict, they will undoubtedly get mad since I am attacking their moral framework which is based on the holy book. I can very well imagine their logic going against their emotions as they try to reason on the reasons for what they believe. I have experienced this very conundrum myself, where good people are trying to defend such malevolent statements in the bible. Can you imagine trying to defend against slavery or bashing children's heads on rock. If you are a christian, you could say that the passages should be interpreted in context of their time or something of that nature, but some things like killing little kids by bashing their heads into rocks is just wrong, no matter what time or place you are from. In the end however peoples decisions can rarely be linearly interpreted to logic or emotion or calculated choices after evaluation of options, The people who are stuck basically usually do two things, they will either choose to follow their cruel moral framework/code or decide to abandon that version of morality for another better morality.

Psalms 137:8-9

⁸ O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction,
happy is he who repays you
for what you have done to us-
⁹ he who seizes your infants
and dashes them against the rocks.

Hosea 13:16
¹⁶ The people of Samaria must bear their guilt,
because they have rebelled against their God.
They will fall by the sword;
their little ones will be dashed to the ground,
their pregnant women ripped open."

This is basically from one of the tenants of Cultural relativism

There is no objective measurement that can be used to tell whether one culture’s moral norms are better than another’s. There’s no moral laws or truths that hold for all societies all of the time.

This excerpt was gotten from discussions on Mashada

'The Evolution of Confusion' by Dan Dennett, AAI 2009

2010-10-09T09:00:00.000-07:00

What do you make of this confusion?

Piracy

2010-08-27T20:29:00.000-07:00

Online piracy in the form of p2p and other file sharing using means like online hosting and IRC's is one of the largest sectors of crime in today's world. "One credible analysis by the Institute for Policy Innovation concludes that global music piracy causes $12.5 billion of economic losses every year, 71,060 U.S. jobs lost, a loss of $2.7 billion in workers' earnings, and a loss of $422 million in tax revenues, $291 million in personal income tax and $131 million in lost corporate income and production taxes" according to the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI). To combat this, Organizations like the EFF, RIAA, MPAA, MPA, GVU and others have mounted a considerably huge legal campaign which we now call the The Intellectual Property Wars.

A long time ago, when the prepubescent adolescent hormones of stupidity ruled my mind and i didn't have a computer, I got caught shoplifting. Of course, this was horrendously stupid , not advisable and will never be repeated; but for the 20 buck movie, I got a year of probation, had to pay close to 1000 dollars in legal fees and almost went deaf for a month due to the yelling I got from my parents.

Today, all around me people are doing much worse and getting off Scot free. I watched the movie that i tried to steal so long ago on a computer for free(not on my computer off-course!) I even know a couple of online hosting sites where you can watch the movie and many others illegally without any legal recourse possible. In the engineering department, There are so many people in the engineering department carrying laptops around with pirated softwares like Orcad, Allegro, Matlab, Proteus, Autocad that have licenses that can go for about 1000 to 3000 dollars without any sort of guilt whatsoever. I am basically shooting myself in the foot right of the bat in my studies and in real life if i choose not to use warez software. There are open source options like KiCad and others and, legal options like student licenses, other options like exclusively using school computer but to be able to compete in the academic world and even in the real world, you gots to be rich or do some pirating.

For quite a while, I used to regularly buy a magazine called racecar engineering. This is a UK magazine that analytically talks about the technology in High-performance cars and automotive racing machines. It was one of a kind. They would talk about F1 technologies like the J-damper, F1 aero devices like barge boards, diffusers and double diffusers, ground effects skirts. They would analyze aero on open and closed wheel prototypes in detail. rake angles,ride height effects for front and rear, effects of aero devices like the splitter, canards e.t.c. One of my favorite issues was one where they were able to get detailed plans of the BloodHound SSC, almost a year before the builders even made a scale model. It was SO COOL!

But the fact of the matter is I am an unemployed sap, Even though I used to try and buy the magazine monthly, I stopped due to financial problem, and as a result due to low demand for the magazine, the only bookstore selling the magazine (Barnes & Noble) stopped stocking it. It is now simply impossible to find the magazine in Mobile Alabama. All of this drama could have been avoided if i simply torrented the magazine instead.

The intellectual property war has now become such a stupid fight with lawyers, governments, companies, and legions of people fighting out this battle that cant be won. What possible reason can exist for fining a single mother 2 million dollars for a single cd. We have got to get to a middle ground. Pirating on one level is wrong, if people in a society do not have a basic respect for other peoples intellectual property then that society is not really healthy. However the current copyright and patent laws are illogical and hopelessly outdated, some of the most prominent laws have gone unchanged since the early 15'th century, and the RIAA and other western organization in lieu with America and other western countries are using these laws as a vice to perpetuate neocolonialism on the rest of the world. So humanity is stuck and will stay stuck in this web for quite a while.

There are many such reasons that people pirate. It is simply unwise to follow some given antiquated sense of morality that is not defined by you to your own detriment. You simply do what you got to do. However a good guideline to use is to still retain a basic respect for intellectual property, don't blatantly flaunt the law like for example hosting a server in your basement or blogging about piracy :D and pray to Jebus or whomever you choose to that the RIAA, MPAA or the many other big bullies don't choose to pick on you.

Emotions

2010-08-17T23:50:00.001-07:00

Emotions are the enemy of reason. Get swept up in emotions and you are bound to lose the goal in your mind. You get swept up in your angst, despair, ecstasy or desire and you are bound to want to act them out, you are bound to start taking steps to fulfill these feelings. Your behaviour, thought-patterns, ideals, goals and dreams will all eventually heavily corrupted in one way or another by an emotion if let it completely overrun you. So, Control your emotions!!!

You should however treasure and cherish your emotions. Many people choose to suppress and hide what they feel due to the effects that such emotions have. Such a reaction could be highly detrimental. Love, Joy and other enthrallments seem to change reason, logic and basic psychological balance; Sadness, anger and fear tend to do something in the same line. Depending on the situation or atmosphere you are in, you might not appreciate the effects. For example, a romantic interest might distract from a given task or anger might get you too steamed up to work properly. You must however remember that emotions are the fuel behind all our actions. You must value this fuel wherever it is from. Cherish your feelings for they might be of use in your future.

Isaac Asimov, greatest sci-fi writer yet

2010-07-15T19:47:00.000-07:00

There have been many great science-fiction writers. The golden age, the birth of Hard sf had many great writers like John Campbell,Robert Heinlein and many more . The greatest writer for me however is undoubtedly Isaac Asimov. He was essentially a claustophilic, aviophobic coot who was born in the Soviet Union. When his parents emigrated to the United States. Isaac (three years old at the time) stowed away in their baggage. He has been an American citizen since the age of eight.

At the age of nine, he found the love of his life (in the inanimate sense) when he discovered his first science-fiction magazine. By the time he was eleven, he began to write stories, and at eighteen, he actually worked up the nerve to submit one. It was rejected. After four long months of tribulation and suffering, he sold his first story and, thereafter, he never looked back.

Isaac Asimov was unlike any other writer in his age in that he used real life scientific truths to think of introspective and intriuging possibilities for the future and that in almost all his science fiction works, he used these to build up a universe, with such interesting and intricate technological, social, political structures that till today, many authors still use his fictional universe in their works(the three laws of robotics,positronic brain, the galactic empire,e.t.c.). He invented the term robotics, Psychohistory(which is an actual study), wrote over 500 pieces of work, won over 20 different awards and had 14 honor doctorates. His foundation series and the robot series still are the greatest works of fiction to date, though some may say that other title like the lord of the rings fiction are better or maybe David weber's honorverse build a greater story, I fervently disagree.

Here is a Quote from one of his robot series books, Robots and Empires

“My death, Daneel,” he said, “is not important. No individual death among human beings is important. Someone who dies leaves his work behind and that does not entirely die. It never entirely dies as long as humanity exists. --Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Daneel said, “Yes, Partner Elijah.”

“The work of each individual contributes to a totality and so becomes an undying part of the totality. That totality of human lives--past and present and to come--forms a tapestry that has been in existence now for many tens of thousands of years and has been growing more elaborate and, on the whole, more beautiful in all that time. Even the Spacers are an offshoot of the tapestry and they, too, add to the elaborateness and beauty of the pattern. An individual life is one thread in the tapestry and what is one thread compared to the whole?

“Daneel, keep your mind fixed firmly on the tapestry and do not let the trailing off of a single thread affect you. There are so many other threads, each valuable, each contributing--”

Adult stuff

2010-07-11T21:28:00.000-07:00

It is a shame that I am still a virgin.Due to the haphazard habitation pattern my family had even in our home country, I was unable to establish any relations substantial enough to provide physical relations. And the social atmosphere in U.S.A was quite alien and frightening to me, so I generally avoided it. In light of these fact my thought on the overall gender placement and attitude in society might be abit mysogynistic, but I think that I speak some truth.

What is the American dream, what is the ideal dream. For me before the onset of the perplexity associated with adolescence, My aspirations were very wild. One day I was considering my engineering career while the very next day assessing the capabilities of ninjutsu in modern day life. When I experienced the mental, physical and sexual upsets of puberty coupled with the expectations and needs of a young adult. The flighty ambition of my youth was curbed.

It is at this stage in many people's life's that their goals are set. The aspirations of a man or woman whatever they may be blossom or die in adolescence. This is where men are broken and turned into husk for relegation of genealogy or decide to live and fulfill their emulations, the birth or death of the gentleman. It is unlikely to happen in childhood as sexuality and parentage do not come into account for life dreams, as such it is not common place for a child talking about living a peaceful unsurprising life to work, make children and retire. What is it then that can make a vibrant young man or woman with dreams of conquering the world into a reserved tool that only talks about retiring in florida to a life of sunbathing and skinny dipping at 45 years of age? This is the ultimate of bending over and taking loserdom in the rear and it happens in so many lives . No life experience or obscure emotion can cause such a change in so many people in the world so much, One of the main causes of this has to be the draws of that come with sexual maturity (girlfriends,desire for children etc).The birth of the captain-save-a-hoe in each of us

When most people think of redirection of vigor due to sexuality, they think of the woman or man as only a sexual distraction, but what i fear is the curling away of ambition and motivation that is brought forth by the concentration to the tasks of maintaining relations, reproduction and/or rearing of children, The toll on one's mind and body by adult life, on your strive(the effect of intimate relations, interpersonal , children etc on your career,dreams and other things you individually strive for) This is partly due to effectual animisms (lust,eroticism,analism ,e.t.c.) but a lot of this due to the sheer amount of energy needed for the task. I am sure that even feminist might agree that the transformation from woman to mother is not proactive to the ambitions and dreams of others around them. I know a woman who would have gone to college if it weren't for a child she got, I know dozens of guys who give up career opportunities for unwarranted parental reasoning, I know another woman who would still be running for senator if it weren't for her marriage. This girl who I went with to community college for an automotive course has retreated to an obsure body shop even when she had a prospective job at a racing shop in another town just to please her 'man', dudes giving up college,tools, business opportunities all to somehow advance the causes of the nuclear family. Evidence of this egnima pervades language, culture and philosophy almost everywhere. Gossip talk always refers to entering relationships with wording like 'snagging a man' or 'capturing a lady', In the case of objects or other ambitions pertaining with marriage, we see a pronounced intractableness when object are in question as in the case of sports cars, clothes, hobbies e.t.c. Even the mindset put in most unions is marriage first then everything else e.g. I might be the president of the U.S.A but my marriage (and then God!) comes first.

There is no concencus on the definition of the word gentleman. Talk to a feminist and they abhor the word as if the gentleman was born to cater to some body of doctrine expounding theories of feminine weakness. Talk to some women and the “gentleman” is a treated as a rare commodity in this harsh ongoing world. Basic Morality, incentives for civility, the knightly values and vague romanticism concepts might have a lot to do with the label of gentleman but the a vital concept of the meaning attached to this word is the fallibility of any male sentiment towards female sentiment. The endearment of the attachments to interest of a sexual partner. This is the grave criticism I and many others have with basic ideology surrounding the platonic romantic attachments that society associate to definitions of companionship or love entailed in meaning of gentlemanship, they almost always illogically endear themselves towards irrational hedonistic affection seeking feelings with an endpoint advocating surrealist escapist presentism. It robs ones self of dreams and goals of the future and replaces them with an insipid allusions of reality laking vision or substance. It simply engenders ones mind to the lameness of thought that defines the people who are losing or have lost the fire in their belly i.e. the sunbathers in Florida or in other words people who are losing or have lost the readiness to fight with energy and determination for what they believe is the right direction of their life.

This is something that should be watched for, the endangerment of one's envisionment of his or her personal future. I do not want my dreams and visions of my future to go down the drain all due to some emotion that nobody really understands or can quantify. Biological science views love as a mammalian drive like thirst or hunger, however psychology attributes it more to a quality linking it with intimacy,commitment and passion, theologians view it as something caused by god and most people just avoid defining it since they do not want to understand it, and since it is parcel of their daily frugal lives, they just roll with it. I want to acquire sexual,proliferational and emotional satisfaction from the partner of my choosing without messing with my will or without a change in direction of my life outlook.

This is the death of the gentleman, the birth of pimping or playerism as I use these words today. The philosophy that says hopes, visions and dreams should outlast any love interests and emotions present in ones life. I am bound to get a lot of criticism because this goes against the basic tenets of the Romantic movement associating happiness with absence of critical thought, or maybe because I am a virgin, or maybe ingrained logic dictates that my philosophy goes against a harmless,loving and carefree philosophy of love that promotes peace and happiness, or maybe because intuition lead to think that the needs of instinctual commitments towards mating must be more important than any individual concepts or maybe again because I am a virgin.

However I disagree with this, No romanticist sentiment should stop me from accomplishing my goals or crush my hopes or destroy my dreams. The “love is noble and inherently good” argument is bullshit! It might seem totally Ok from a romantic standpoint to discount the women and men physically, mentally and corporeally harmed due to concepts of love which are built by irrationality i.e. religious theology,vanity in media, mindless emotion, e.t.c. And just 'go with it' i.e. this irrationality. But from a logical standpoint the harm these viewpoints have does is not seemingly worth it.

Many might debate this, there is a mysticism surrounding love such that if romantics are asked about such problems with the their theories of love,they might bring arguments saying that true love does not detract from personal life.You could point to real examples but if these 'philosophers of love' are asked about this inconsistency, they might say that this or that is not true love but you need to remember that there is no universal definition of love, these ideas are part of the problematic relationship complex that has bugged humanity for a long time, never rationalizing only following mass trend with regard to relationships. The instinctual commitments towards propagation of the human race have never been as important as to ignore ones dreams of the future, Indeed the two usually almost go together as many plans for one's future involve children. The thing that destroys our plans for time to come thereafter is the attachment to the opposite sex in these matters. Aren't matters of Child raising and Love not separate? Is it really imperative for the crushing embrace of irrational, hedonistic, mystic and embolistic love to hinder child fostering or even emotional relationships?

I say no! In any of my emotional relationships to come, I will and must always remain pimping. I really think that one can be emotionally attached to someone without sallying away from your future or wanted destiny. For it is unimaginable for me for my goals and dreams which I choose not to disclose in this essay to die off no matter what. Some may say that these theories of mine are due to my virginity but I intend to test these ideas by ridding myself of this virgin label post haste!

BP oil spill update

2010-06-27T14:20:00.000-07:00

Well, It is now 69 days into the Deep water horizon oil spill, What's happening?

BP's Oil cap is still in place although the amount of oil collected is less than half than is leaking from the sea floor.

The efficiency of the whole oil collection operation is still in question. Never mind that an underwater robot is somehow able to knock off the cap, while filming! There is no emergency plan if a storm were to come near the operation, Even though it is hurricane season and there is a tropical storm(alex) on the way; Official procedure is just to abandon collection of oil if there is a storm.

BP has replaced their CEO in a futile attempt to placate the American public. After BP CEO Tony Hayward's recent inconsiderate remarks about the spill "eating up his personal time", being caught on his luxury yatch sipping mohitos in the heat of the crisis, and his frankly awful gaffe at the hearing in congress

, and not to mention unleashing the obama on himself, the British dude had to go. He was replaced by a man who BP calls a real "southern guy" someone who was "affected" by the spill like the rest of us, Mr. Bob Dudley

There have been attempts from the US. to gain more control. BP has been essentially forced to not pay dividends to its shareholders and set up an independent entity with 20 billion dollars in funds for compensation

Their public repoire has gotten so low that their own twitter account is supposedly being eclipsed by one dedicated to mocking them.They are on a very weak limb and can be pushed around by anyone marginally influential. Kevin Costner was able to get BP to buy 32 of his crap centrifuge things that separate oil from water. They were basically badgered into submission for alabama , florida and louisiana for money to be used in advertisments(stupid ones at that)

Alabama's Gulf Coast - Lucy Buffett Tourism Spot

BP is still a Supermajor oil company, Even with all the money they are supposed to be shelling out, They will still be at a profit.The company is probably still run with finances being the first and foremost priority.

The gulf is seemingly first and foremost a financial headache, then a legal one and then maybe a social one. That is why for example when a crowd-sourcing effort such as InnoCentive comes up with nearly 1000 usable ideas for review on a task that BP itself set up for them. The Oil giant can totally ignore the effort with only the feeblest excuse and not be straying from its goals.
Its gotten so bad that people are starting to question BP's Value. Gulf Fund Administrator, Kenneth Feinberg might say that there is no sense bankrupting BP but that stand point along with other related ones are now questionable.

Should we continue pressuring British Petroleum even though we are causing damage to the cooperation? Should America begin planning on seizing BP assets in America(in case BP wont pay) to ensure that the damage to the gulf is fixed even though this might (at least temporarily) actually bankrupt the company? Should the US government have put a moratorium on deep sea drilling to re-assess the dangers involved and revamp regulation in the sector even though we are now putting some hurt on an already fragile industrial sector?e.t.c.

UPDATE: The flow of oil in the well has now been officially really capped

2010-06-25T23:55:00.000-07:00

Well, the US and England made it into the round of 16.

I understand some of the anger that American fans have at the football referee who called a foul just before the U.S. team scored. I even think that the foul really was commited in the match aganist Slovenia but commentary from the ESPN coverage was douchy and slightly asshold-like.

World Cup: blaming the 'incompetent African'

I would hope that future criticism would be restricted to non-flammatory,non-arsenine comments that don't insinuate that african referres are by and large 'third rate' and were included in the world cup just for political correctness.

Mind you that in their match aganist Algeria, the same thing happened to the demsey player(8) and i did not hear a peep aganist the Belgian refs.

That being said, I am uber excited about tommorows match of USA vs. Ghana. I would like to cheer for the US. but I just have to support the only african team now in the world cup.

Go Ghana!

BP HQ.

2010-06-11T19:27:00.001-07:00

USA! USA! USA!

2010-06-11T18:52:00.000-07:00

There appears to be alot of briton blowback that is on the side of British Petrolium. The british seemingly dont want BP to have to pay for damages in the Gulf. They are wary of any US. governmental pressure on "Their Company" and some of them even want the U.S. government to finance cleaning up the Gulf instead of BP.

The language and rhetoric of this dispute is going into the danger zone, is becoming too highly personalized. The interpretation over here, not just by me but others, is that it has a certain anti-British rhetoric to it — and that has to be of concern,

John Napier

You want the oil, America ......You clean up the Mess!!

South Carlifornia Public Radio

The British government's response so far has been much more measured. Speaking on a visit to Afghanistan, new Prime Minister David Cameron said he understood the U.S. government's frustration over the spill. But then the famously jingoistic Daily Mail newspaper ran a front-page headline that read, "Stand up for your country, Mr. Cameron."

The mood was heightened further by suggestions from Washington that BP should suspend its dividend to shareholders; some British news outlets say that will be announced next week.

NPR

The Labour party is seemingly deeply involved in the lobbying for BP in the name of the pensioners in britain and other people investing in the Oil giant. It is however still quite a far way for BP to the end of the crisis though. They still have to cap the leak and also pony up for damages.

It is with all this political upheaval that the World cup match of USA Vs. England occurs, Tomorrow at 1:30 Central time.

What do the Yanks have to say?

We Kicked Redcoat Ass at Yorktown, We’ll Kick Redcoat Ass in South Africa

Moondog

Landon Donovan, The U.S. captain has cranked up the USA's bid to beat England today by claiming the Yanks don't fear any team at the World Cup.

There's no reason why we can't compete with England. If we give ourselves a chance to make plays and we make them, we can beat them.

Donovan

All I can think of is what George Washington said

My first wish is to see this plague of mankind banished from the earth.

So lets whoop their farking asses!
USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!!!!!!

Effects of Mystiscism and Religious fervor

2010-06-08T14:10:00.001-07:00

Found this on a casual Bing search , This event happened in 2009 but I just had to post the video. Seriously fucked up if you ask me.

Five people suspected to be witchcrafts were bruterly murded in kisii Nyamataro Village after the accused them of possession of charms.

video

Why to Live

2010-06-08T13:51:00.000-07:00

Why do we have to live?

In my philosophical quandries, I have thought up this question and I cannot for the life of me produce a convincing universal argument for this query. Of course My question is unanswerrable since it automatically assumes that in each and every scenario possible, The Human involved has to live.But in reality, Nobody has to live; you could get a 9 and put it on your noggin. It is not likely that you will continue to live. As such, There is no solution to this query since the underlying premise is false.So maybe i should rephrase my question

Why we should strive to live?

Why should we wake up each and every day and labour extensively to keep on existing? We all share some basic fears that help keep us living. The fear of death, fear of the unkown, fear of the afterlife e.t.c. These fears act as a negative reinforcement against giving up on life. But is there any positive cause that can help push a person into deciding to keep on living? is there any cause that encourage us to continue with life? Of course, there are many personal reasons or answers to this question. We all have dreams, aspirations, goals, commitments and many other ties to our existence that keep us moving or striving on for more life. For example, I want to single handedly revolutionize Africa to be on par with the western nations,I want to make east africa to be an economic powerhouse able to create and sustain growth at levels comparable to European countries and the USA. I want to make Kenya rich and keep it stable. I want to elevate the Kikuyu tribe to be more than just a tribal entity but a social, political, economic and corporeal group. I want to make Mbari ya Njagi super cool, and achieve super awesome things, I love my family and would want more power for them. These thing keep me tied to life, they are the fire on my backside, spurring me on to keep living and to keep striving.

Is there anything like this that can be applied universally to all humans to argue that all of them should keep on striving to live?

I am not naive enough to think that my goals can be applied to anyone else. Of course, some people share goals, dreams and ideals. I am probably not the only one trying to improve africa or east africa. I am not the only Kikuyu that is working to better the status of the tribe, My brother, sister, mother and father are all doing their level best to improve Mbari ya Njagi. But some dreams are not shared, everybody has some unique dream or aspiration in their life, for example nobody in my family shares my dreams of participating in rallying or race car driving, I dare venture to say that nobody in the whole of mobile, Alabama even thinks about going to Nyandarua, Kenya or Mucharage, Kenya to go swimming and mud bogging in the rivers there. Nobody in the entire world regularly daydreams about marrying a specific girl(who I wont name)in Kenya and then touring the US. and Kenya in an RV. Nobody does.

The world is so diverse that I cannot think of a single thing that is universally strived for. You might say happiness is a universal ideal but not everybody is looking for it, Some people are all too pleased to cause calamity and disaster. You might say that peace is the universal goal but some people derive profit,satisfaction and happiness from violence or war. You might say it is Order but i personally know more than one anarchist who will disagree with you profusely, You might think that everyone wants sunny skies but some people are actually praying for rain. This might go on and on for eternity and in the end would turn out fruitless.

Is there any clear goal, dream, aspiration or ideal that can be applied universally to all humans to argue that all of them individually should keep on striving to live?

No, there is not. If I find one, I will have to update this article.

P.S:I try to update the blog as often as possible but as always when i try to document my ideas, they seem to get stuck in my head or in rough draft form ,uncharacterisable and unrecognisable to others. I thought that I would try to experiment with shorter posts but I don't want to turn my blog into something like twitter where half baked ideas coupled with irrational human impulsiveness has created a garrishly fickle social catastrophe.

It's top kill time!

2010-05-27T11:04:00.000-07:00

BP is trying a technique called top kill to plug the Gulf Coast oil leak
What is Top kill?

The top kill is a pretty amazing thing. It was devised over the past month by BP, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Energy Department, and the Minerals Management Service. It centers around the Helix Q4000 surface platform and encompasses three ships full of mud, one of which is the 381-foot HOS Centerline, one of the largest supply ships in the world. The process is somewhat involved, but it comes down to this: The Centerline uses 30,000-hp pump to shove between 40 to 50 barrels of mud per minute over to the Q4000, which then diverts it down to the leaking BOP through a mile-long pipe. The mud is stuffed into the well at such a rate that it overcomes the gushing oil, forcing the leak to taper and the well to become static. A concrete cap is then applied, sealing the leak permanently.

Will it work?

Greg McCormack, director of the Petroleum Extension Service at the University of Texas at Austin, said he's cautiously optimistic that the top kill will work, saying: "There's always a trade-off between making it better and making it worse. This probably has the least amount of risk of making it worse."

The danger is that the top kill could worsen the situation. The powerful injection of mud might destabilize the blowout preventer, or punch a bigger hole in the sharp kink in the riser just a few feet above the blowout preventer. If the mud doesn't beat back the spill, that could mean a mess of mud mixed with a larger flow of oil and gas.

You guys should have seen Mr. Obama at his Presidential meeting today. He was being flooded with tons of question on this matter. Still I am not really concerned, The Oil is not affecting alabama that much and it seems it might stay that way.
Jalopnik

Update:
Top kill has failed !!!

If you were looking at the feed on friday till sunday, you would have seen that the mud stuff stopped flowing out and the oil started back up again. Well over the last few days, BP officially gave up on the top kill and said they were moving to another method to try and stop the leak

The Petroleum Company have tried various methods to stop the leak or alleviate the damage and it is up in the air what they will try next.

They tried the oil dome thing

They tried the Top hat thing

They are actually now able to siphon off a percentage of the leaking oil even though it is only about 25% of it

They have set up about 3 million feet of boom(about 1 million meters) in the gulf

They have dumped such a huge amount of dispersant into the gulf that the EPA is now on their tail to switch dispersant's or at least stop using as much(As if the EPA doesn't have bigger things to worry about in the gulf)

The current news is that they have succesfully cut the pipe and with their cap of sort to plugging the leak, they are able to get about hambyaku percent of the oil.

BP says it’s already preparing for the next attempt to stop the leak. Under the new plan, BP would use robot submarines to cut off the damaged riser from which the oil is leaking, and then try to cap it with a containment valve. The new attempt would take four days to complete.

AP

You have to remember that there is the last resort i.e. the relief well which is two months away but by that time alot of oil will have leaked and nobody wants that.

Hopefully they cap the well, or siphon the oil or do whatever to prevent more damage to the gulf

Justice!

2010-05-24T20:12:00.000-07:00

On April, The latest catholic stumbling block ,which was unsurprisingly linked to child abuse came to light. An American priest with a record of molesting children had been continually shielded from the public defrocking by the church. As it turns out, One of the people in charge of making this decision was then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger who is now Pope Benedict XVI. This seems to have been a spark and ignited a huge backlash on the catholic church.

The catholic church has had a lot of scandals,some with no other obvious purpose other than to create controversy . The church has been accused of alleged ties to the Nazi regime, the mafia and other clandestine organizations,It has been alleged to colluding to spark violence in Rwanda, Congo and Nigeria, the church has been known for controversial policies like barring use of condoms in AIDS ridden parts of Africa, and abortions, even in emergency cases. There have also been countless sexual crimes in clergy and you also have to remember that these ethically unacceptable actions or malfeasances are only in this generation of the church. The whole history of the catholic church is full of things like the inquisitions, abuse of authority, holy wars,anti-Semitism e.t.c.

Should the catholic church as a whole face some sort of litigation for their crimes? Can there be steps that can to achieve some sort of justice or some sort of penalty? To try and deter such questionable future actions.Is it possible strike back at the religious catholic society for the wrongdoings it has committed?

Richard Dawkins is planning to have the pope arrested on charges of crimes against humanity when he visits Britain on September of this year, of course this charge is brought on mainly due to the fresh charges of cover-up of child abuse after the 2008 scandal still involving the pope, and the endless litany of scandal after scandal involving the catholic church.Part of Dr. Dawkins task though is to obtain some legal reprieve from the catholic religious society for their collective crimes against humanity.

But some questions do arise.

How can you define a religious society?

A religious society as I see it is a self conscious, and self promoting organism in that the religious institutions that make up a religious society are mainly used to promote theology and to sell its respective religious dogma to the masses.

What is it that people accomplish in religious institutions, what are the detriments associated with these institutions?

There are many reasons that individuals choose to go to church, the mosque or whatever religious institution and/or practice a given religion, but we can derive one general purpose from almost all religious adherents. Each and every person is constantly always in the process of building and rebuilding their lives, or defining and redefining themselves. The church is a recognized temperate for an admirable, good and respectable character. When humans are building themselves, in a process somewhat similar to house construction i.e. brick by brick, many of them use the religious teaching, the religious community and such as building material for their personalities, minds and life outlooks. Like the Cornerstone analogy the Christians use,

Isaiah 28:16
So this is what the Sovereign LORD says:
"See, I lay a stone in Zion,
a tested stone,
a precious cornerstone for a sure foundation;
the one who trusts will never be dismayed.

Many believers of religion decide to use this religious stuff as a central support structure in their lives, buying into the religious society.For example, while the catholic adherents can claim to a lot of progress in the modern age to the catholic order, They are also stuck defining themselves using stuff like catholic sex scandals, inquisitions, torture,murder and genocide from the present, and the past. They either have to confront or ignore these wrongs, while the rest of us can accept their reality much more easier because they don't directly affecting our mindsets.

That is why when any atheist should for some reason choose to go to church, confrontational approaches to beliefs of these religious adherent in the church often becomes very explosive. Its like when you build a stack of cards or a brick structure and some dude just comes and takes a brick or card off the bottom and your structure comes tumbling down.

What can Dr. Dawkins hope to accomplish?

It is highly unlikely that Dr. Dawkins legal manoeuvre succeeds. I do hope that it does at least put the pope in a court or even succeed in assigning legal guilt for crimes of the catholic church on the Vatican, but all we can hope for is that the move puts religious organizations back under legal jurisdiction. Maybe then, in time people will be able to strip the Vatican of its country status, make religious organizations pay taxes and exert more legal oversight on religious matters.

Kiswahili tools

2010-05-16T12:17:00.000-07:00

I wanted to do a full article on the blog in Kiswahili. I never get alot of people to talk with in the language and i didn't want all the skills that got drilled into me in primary school and part of high school on composition writing to go to waste.

So I am currently searching on the Interwebz for anything that can help. There have been a number of swahili projects. The most famous undertaking is the Kamusi project for an online kamusi. Then there was the open office project called Jambo .It was supposedly going to be open source revolution for the Kiswahili speaking masses but it has fallen off the radar these days. There has been a swahili packs in Microsoft office, A Swahili reiteration of windows but these commercial products have undoubtedly flopped. Zoho online documents offers swahili spellcheck capabilities but the service is not that good. There is even talk that google documents will have kiswahili settings in the near future. Check out the kiswahili translation of this site

I remember that the Kenya National Examination council not long ago was debating whether to keep the subject on the exams and even though the consensus was to keep it on, There was and still is a lack of real use of the language in professional and commercial circles. It is usually prescient just to use English which is not bad in itself but this might result in unintended marginalization of Kiswahili.

Tribal Politics

2010-05-09T03:23:00.000-07:00

Hi. I am trying to explain to my pen pal from America why there is trouble between tribes because of politics. in America they don't have anything like it, its hard for me to tell him. My teacher said to look up info on the internet to help but how can I explain it to him?

Most people have difficulty understanding 3 things in tribal politics.

They don't understand what a tribe is

They view the tribe as a simple collective group and cant comprehend the tribe being an independent and self-aware entity

They don't see any relative worth that can be gained with tribal politics and don't know why these tribes don't just get along

Americans basically have very little understanding of a tribe or even an indigenous group is. They simply haven't had no exposure to them. The Indian American tribes are small obscure groups with that have no real group identities. Most of them come together only to invest in casino's and such.Try and clearly outline the tribe as an entity, it has a culture, has religious structure, has different lifestyles altogether, . A Tribe is a complex communal organism, and the more clearly you can explain this, The better the understanding.

A lot of people don't see any difference between one tribe and another and simply cannot imagine that one given tribe can act independently of its neighbours or political and social environment. To them being in a tribe is like the same thing as being part Irish or like when one of them is 1/24 Jewish or 1/16 Indian. It is a vague and inconsequential tie that at most serves as a feather for your good genes or something, how can such a thing affect daily life?.But in reality, Tribal identity affects family,community and society, Tribal ties affect who you trust, who you marry, who you do business with, How you feel, treat and live with other people, from your tribe or from other tribes. If you are able to impress the weight associated with a tribal identity, it would increase understanding of the tribal environment.

To many people outside Africa, tribal politics simply has very little merit due to the fact that most preconceptions they have of it assumes that most of the tribal bickering is primitive, "Ape with rock" type disagreements,Analogous to children fighting for candy. "If these tribes are trying to do something important, they would cooperate more". This type of statement has some truth but such a picture increases misunderstandings on the tribes and their dynamics. You have to point out that tribal politics is not just useless bickering. You could point to cases like the 2008 election or the Constitution reform or other cases. You don't have to restrict yourself to Kenya, you can use examples from other countries like south Africa Boers and apartheid, you could also use similar analogues from India, Pakistan and other countries out of Africa to show that tribal politics are used to obtain given objectives and can produce real and substantive consequences.

If the people get these three things, They should have a clear picture of tribal politics.

Options

2010-05-09T03:19:00.000-07:00

I have had alot of problems with windows XP activation from just updating the RAM on my computer. I had to try dozens or so of activation bypass cracks until one worked, At times i was even shut out of the computer all together.

So, I'm trying to dual boot with ubuntu so that i cant be helpless once windows decides to act up again, but I'm having tons of trouble. No sound, tons of crashing even after updating, On top of all this, I am now in possession of a laptop that has an unrecovarable windows OS, so i have to make linux work on it or else i will be stuck trying to get windows 7 or something.it has now reached the point where I'm just doing google searches to find solutions.How have you guys encounters with Linux been?

Impacts of The Giants

2010-04-29T16:27:00.000-07:00

On April 20th, there was an oil rig explosion of the coast of the Louisiana and Alabama.

Oil Spill’s Blow to BP’s Image May Eclipse Costs
Gulf Oil Spill Could Eclipse Exxon Valdez Disaster

The immediate damage of this accident is minimal, as only 11 people are missing and not that much crude has leaked yet. The rig, owned by BP is theorized to have experienced a blowout which somehow caused the Fire that made it collapse. Now the metallic contraption is at the bottom of the ocean spewing about 400,00 gallons of crude into the sea per day.

There have been such two recent incidents in America that have caused a great review in energy policy. First there was a huge mine explosion in Virginia that killed dozens of miners then there was this explosion of oil rig in the gulf coast.This comes just as President Obama just threw his support into offshore drilling . This was obviously a compromise due to the health-care reform for blue-dog democrats so he might not exactly have been singing "Drill baby drill", but it is interesting to see the Mr. Super O squirm as his image takes such a hit . huh. He cut his wall street reform rallying short just to visit an Ethanol plant in Missouri to try and appease the country that he really "digs" new energy.With all sorts of stories going on about how this might be a diabolical plot by the supermajor oil players, i think this topic is going to become a point of conflict in the time to come.

The long term damage of the accident is harder to gauge. Most estimates say that the clean up cost is going to be much higher than the Exxon valdez oil spill. The damage to wildlife and the enviroment is expected to be much higher with the Missisipi river delta and other sensitive costal areas with the oil slicks starting to arrive today on the last day of april.

The April 20 explosion of a BP rig killed 11 people and eventually led to the platform's sinking about 50 miles off the Louisiana coast. But now the ensuing spill threatens 445 species of fish, 45 species of mammals, 32 species of amphibians and reptiles, and 134 species of birds, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries told AOL News. And when the massive oil slick makes landfall in Louisiana on Friday, it will hit 10 wildlife refuges or management areas, such as the Gulf Islands National Seashore.

I went across the bay on Tuesday and i could already see a little bit of oil on the shores and discolouration of the water. I think that the politics, damage and clean up effort will end up affecting very many people on the Gulf coast. I just wish i knew where my phone was so that i could snap some pictures.

Men's right

2010-04-27T22:20:00.000-07:00

We all know of the women's rights movement, but what about the men’s rights movement. I for one used didn’t think highly of it. I used to label the movement in the same category as the gay movement and then if i had a misogynistic thought, i would just think about it the way alot of men do and just say "fuck a bitch" but the men’s rights movement does play a role in speaking against some injustices in today's world, for example:

As i have said before, marriage has long been regarded by many as the most important step in relationships. The definition of marriage has been hijacked from a simply forming of a kinship to the highly religious,ecclesiastical injunction, and/or the legal and financial clusterfuck of an entrapment web that has become common-place these days and is alot of the times detrimental to the intimate relationships in question.Even in precolonial time, arranged marriages and concepts like bride price or dowry were common and they had alot of contention involved. However there are a great number of alternatives ranging from simple cohabitation to the infamous ‘friends with benefits” relationships that exist and offer the same things that marriage does without the legal, social and financial implications that marriage does. There are also options like secular legal unions that avoid religious entrapments of church marriage.

Marriage strike is the name given to the phenomenon of males refusing to marry for fear of unfair legislations and financial ramifications of divorce for the male. Men's rights writer matthew weeks has described divorces as 'slavery for men'.the rutgers report — though based on a small sample — found ten prevalent reasons for declining preference for marriage among males. The first three are that they can get sex without marriage; they can enjoy a pseudo-wife through cohabitation; and they want to avoid divorce and its financial risks.

Due to archaic definitions of gender roles, we find a great need for the men’s right movement. The fathers’ rights movement is a very good example of this. In divorces or cases of unwed fathers, we find unjustifiable inequality in legal cases about child custody or child support. In a huge chunk of these cases shared parenting, child support or even best interest for the children is not considered adequately instead the legal prescient is defaultly assumed to be in favor of the females. There are also the cases of parental fraud where the mother of a given child lies about the father for financial reasons. In many jurisdictions around the world, DNA testing is not considered by courts or is unavailable. In many other legal situation, there is quite an unfair pressure against the fathers in the situation.

There are many other causes in employment, education, conscription, social norms e.t.c. That present unfair circumstances for men but a lot of people don’t get to hear about it. This is partially due to an effect called the lace curtain in the media, where people, the media consciously choose to ignore men issues, some theorize that it is due to an evolutionary trait that humanizes women more than men, or maybe it is because feminist firms hold enough lobbying power to redirect attention away from issues they don’t like, maybe it is because people paying attention to this are somehow viewed as gay, but the lace curtain is real since there apparently exists a force that seems to cause media to ignore issues concerning men’s rights.

I mean for example; If you take a look at the picture above, It does look gay as fuck! but the market for lawyers like Mr Sam. is actually on the rise to the ever increasing legal injustice against men 1 2 3. and sadly you will never get to hear about it since there is no appetite for cases in this circle, at least in the media.

In brief, men’s lives count only to the degree they are heroes who perform for us or save us, or villains who disturb our peace. Women’s lives count more for their own sake…a woman’s pain is every talk show.

We so rarely inquire of a man’s grief, we forget it exists. When princess di had her affair, we asked her about her isolation, her depression, her husband’s aloofness; but when prince charles had an affair, we accused him of infidelity.... As a result, billions of women worldwide identified with princess di. Few men had any male fears with which to identify.Hearing women’s internal stories – without hearing men’s – made the world seem unfair to women. Ironically, because we didn’t know men’s stories were being left out, the more we heard from women the more we thought we’d been neglecting women. Soon it became politically incorrect to interrupt her flow. So women’s stories became women’s studies, not to be interrupted by men’s studies.

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Graduates of women’s studies courses soon controlled gender related decisions in almost all large bureaucracies. When an issue about sexual harassment or date rape came up on a college campus, the feminists flooded the committees concerning these decisions, created the agenda, and decided who would be hired as consultants and speakers.

The problem? women with backgrounds in women’s studies were not only uneducated about men, but often saw men as the problem and women as the solution. They had demonized men. If someone spoke up against them, they weren’t just outnumbered, they were labeled sexist. And what we will see in this chapter is how that labeling led to the end of careers in the ‘80s and ‘90s as quickly as being labeled communist ended careers in the 1950s.

The power of feminists to allow only a feminist perspective to be aired (in every field that dealt with gender issues) came to be labeled the "lace curtain."

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How do you know if you’re part of the lace curtain? if you feel more comfortable telling a man-bashing joke than a joke bashing all women. How do you know if you’re in an organization that’s part of the lace curtain? when you tell a man-bashing joke and everyone laughs, then tell a woman-bashing joke and no one laughs.... In some organizations, the censorship starts sooner... We don’t even think of telling the woman-bashing joke!

The lace curtain is less a "woman thing" than a feminist thing. But feminism has made women-as-victim so credible we would sooner think of saving whales than saving males. In this respect, almost all of us contribute to the lace curtain.

But all this is irrelevant to me, whether these sentiments are real or made up, whether these injustices are on the rise or they are decreasing, whether the men's right movement can help or hurt the world does not concern me. The main philosophy i follow is “fuck a bitch”. I generally avoid thinking, feeling, empathizing or concerning myself with anything to do with feminism and such. But you know me, i am slightly misogynist and i might be considered abit sexist so my opinion is not that credible.

What do you guys think? What value does the men's rights hold to you?

MenWeb - Men's Issues: The Lace Curtain

Randomness ~ in religion

2010-04-18T21:24:00.000-07:00

Manifest destiny~The painting

The randomness that we are privy to in life is a testament to the actuality that there is no set course, no single or even primary guiding force to decide the way things will happen. Our living history is guided by a sort of mutualistic anarchism inherent in all existence.

There is no single controller of predestination, No one person planning your life or no single force colliding galaxies .We are all pushing buttons ,pulling lever, or performing actions trying to exert some influence in some sort of fashion to some sort of end in our lives, our surroundings and the world in general. We can work every day to prevent global warming through the smallest actions like turning out lights, improve neighborhoods by participating in charitable work, or earn money through the sleaziest of means like shoplifting e.t.c. These are all ways we exercise influence to control our own lives. If you analyze this from a generalistic viewpoint maybe accounting for the actions in a group of people, you might find some things that might indicate that there are forces,ideas or trends that can affect huge amounts of people, you might find locales or subgroups that have been most nearly dominated by singular wills but you will never find any single force being in control of all the buttons, exerting all the influence and directing every facet of an element with total control. You will never really find a specific God influence.

I personally like the idea of God, A perfect entity influencing everything: the world, the community and you the individual to a just,happy and all important destiny that is for some cool,sweet and noble purpose. The God will protect us, control and maintain the universe, give us strength, guidance and love, even look after our tires or at least help us to repair them now that a nail has poked a hole in them. This is a great idea,it appeals to our emotions, minds and corporeal selves. it provides justice, order, plans for the past, present and future things,can make anybody feel good. Many friends and relatives have staked their very lives on this idea, giving away their time, money, minds and freedom to promote it, at a horrendous cost.But I hope they come to realize, it is just an idea, not an reality, not a hidden fact, not even an unclear truth. It is just an idea that appeals to many.

What is Visualization.

2010-04-13T19:08:00.000-07:00

We higher mammals have a gift that we call visualization.It is a cognitive function in conjunction with our senses that allows us to form a mental image of objects of our interest. We usually see, feel, touch,smell or taste something then using cues or previous experience form a model in our minds that we use for the various purposes we see fit. In this obvious statement, we see a profound truth in that we need a basic level of comprehension for visualization.

This implies many things. For one, Visualization is not immediate or universal. If two people see the same thing, one person might visualize it very different from the other person. If for example, two people see a dolphin; one person might be disgusted by the slick skin, one might not; one person might find its prehensile penis scary and the other person might be completely uncaring about the matter. The two people see the dolphin, put the dolphin label on, and then begin to visualize it each in their own way with imagery, sensations, and emotions . The visualization process also relies on understanding. Underlying concepts, ideas, philosophies form this understanding that is used in our mental image. For example, The dolphin has a flipper that moves up and down. Since most fish have anal fins that move side to side, Most people assume that all other aquatic animals have the same underlying structure. However dolphins are not fish and evolved from land mammals. Not knowing these facts can make people picture dolphins with fins and gills instead of how they are in real life. This shows that knowledge makes a big difference in the visualization of an object.

Visualization is seemingly an ethereal process. However as science continues to reveal the inner workings of the mind, We get a glimpse of how the brain visualizes stuff. The visual data gotten from the eye is processed in the occipital lobe. This is unsurprisingly the biggest data cachet that any living thing has and in complex animals like human beings, it is unsuprising that there is a whole lobe in our minds dedicated to processing for sight. The data goes through the various stages of processing before being sent to the parietal lobe through the dorsal stream. The parential lobe is then tasked with integrating all the information from the different modalities to form mainly the spatial and navigational models of reality but also seems to helps with understanding. The Frontal lobe is the other lobe crucial to visualization. "It is the part of each hemisphere of the brain located behind the forehead that serves to regulate and mediate the higher intellectual functions. The frontal lobes have intricate connections to other areas of the brain. In the frontal lobes, we meld emotions, cognition, error detection, volition, a sense of self, and more to create our social brain." It is also important for reward, attention, long-term memory, planning, and drive, however one of the bigger functions it seems to be related to is understanding.In a sense, Creating models ,maps of structures or in other words mental images from data. That is why people injured in this region have problems in problem solving, perceptions of results of actions in relation to systems and structures, mental flexibility e.t.c. This is also partially why teenagers have problems with accurate assesment of risks and regulations of their social,economic and judicial systems, due to immature frontal lobes. Scientist liken the mind to a computer, " It able to decompose any mental representations into its underlying mathematical propositions." We have to keep in mind though that all this processing would be greatly hampered without an sound underlying framework of information about the particular humans enviroment.

In this essay, I make no differentiation in this essay between imagination and visualization. The only real difference i see is that while the imagination term is restricted to mostly imaginary scenarios, we use the word visualization in both real and imaginary mind scenarios. As a matter of fact if you really think about it, humans live a sort of conceptualistic existance. All the structures one thinks he or she visualizes are copies of reality. You guys might think i'm being all Matrix like and doubting reality or i am being all descartes like and doubting existence but it is a fact that what we think we know of reality is just an imperfect copy. We all have to synthesize the data we get from our senses into an image, a copy, a visualization of the reality we see.

Visualization is not only useful in abstract philosophy. It has a great many applications in other fields. Plain simulation, scientific visualization, geo-visualization, information visualization, creative visualization, visualization in information graphics all require this mind skill. We need to remember though that all visualization relies on a proper understanding of the subject matter.

Religion and the use of it, again!

2010-04-02T11:27:00.000-07:00

I would imagine that in the past, life was pretty harsh. The rule of law had not been established. One ran the risk of getting killed at any time, your property raided, your wife raped. You could also get sick and just die. In such a world, religion was very useful in taming the beast in men, as well as explaining the unpredictable world.

Now the question is: with the gradual "civilizing" of human beings and establishment of law and order, from the local police all the way to the hague, with education too, and health care, is there any further need for religion (christianity, islam and all the rest)? Considering also that they have now become a major source of misunderstanding and hatred between peoples?

Of course not all places have been tamed, and some wild frontiers still exist, but in principle, what say you?

Religions are not there to act as a deterrent for "uncivility", At least that is not their main purpose . The religions are systems or structures, social systems within a community that act like tools to be used by the community and by the individuals in the community for given purposes, structures in that they are built, step by step from bottom to top by a given social circle or society due to a variety of causes.

A community might use its religion to bring together people to raise funds for the sick, to provide food for the homeless, to chase bad influence out of town with peaceful protests or pitchforks and many other uses. The community can begin developmental corporations, youth programs e.t.c.

An individual may use religion in personal or small group settings in many ways. Many Farmers to this day send deacons or religious leaders to their fields to bless them, this is a way for the farmer and his family to seem to gain control over the uncontrollable, Families also use the concept of God or higher being as a tool for many things, to explain etheral concepts like emotional connections(love, hate, good, bad, morality), the universe, higher power e.t.c. to strengthen family structure by relying on religious structure for authority, moral superiority e.t.c. Some individual use religion for economic, political and physical reasons

In all this, the individual or groups of people use religion as a tool for some specific purpose whether these purposes are good or bad is irrelevant. Personally i think all religions are lies purported by terrible people for convoluted purposes, but i cant deny that religion still has a vital role in society.

Man has been able to explain things that were erstwhile mysterious and deemed supernatural, and as this knowledge progresses,so will the role of religion diminish.

Religion is not only used as a means of explaining the unexplainable, It has many other uses, one of its main uses in society is as a tool by a group or an individual to try and exert control, this control can be social, pschycological, authoritative or physical. It doesn't have to be good or bad influence but it is obvious religion can increase this influence in many settings.

For example, in the case of a sick child, Even if he or she is in the hands of the best doctors in the world, there is still things that are not under control. The family is unable to help with treatment, the emotions of the family members are in disarray, Panic and confusion might set in, They need to maybe display the emotions of love, affection and caring to the child to set him at ease, they need to voice out concerns even for pragmatic reason e.t.c. In this case, One of the very few tools that can accomplish these goals is maybe if they have a religious belief,they could say a prayer to give a measure of control, to project order, prevent panic and confusion, show love and affection, and voice out concerns at the same time.

Again i am trying to explain a situation where religion can be used positively, I am not claiming that religion is exclusively for people with sick children or something of that nature, I am simply saying that religion can be used to gain some control over that uncontrollable situation, i.e. psycological, emotional, mind(uncontrollable thoughts) e.t.c.

It is not that it is perfect at its role as this tool since all these religious beliefs require a quantity of irrationality and illogicality at their core and You are totally right when you say that the role of religion will continue decreasing, but for many people now these religions act as the only tool to perform some of these functions.

To really understand religious structure we have to change our viewpoint radically. We have to temporarily forget the flaws in these supernatural beliefs and see what they are able to accomplish. Religion for an individual and a group can be seen as a vice to exert influence, maybe it is by invoking supernatural beliefs, maybe it is by relying on the economic, social and organizational structures built by these religion but it is possible to use a religious system to direct the individual, the group or society.

If for example i want to get a child to stop performing an action, I could use religious fear or religious reward to do it. i.e. stop that or you will go to hell, or stop that and god will bless you. I can be a politician to do the same thing to a group like the tea party people. This is the basic religious purpose, another means to try and exert influence or control . You might say that these things could be done without requiring the belief in the supernatural but we still have to view it as an option to accomplish these goals .

But this is precisely what I was saying...that religion evolved as a tool to exert control. By instilling fear of hell, lack of blessings (which is a supernatural phenomenon) etc. The question is: since modern man has outgrown many of these notions, is religion still necessary?

I am not trying to argue that religion is righteous,on the contrary there alot of problems and bad things in religion,but if you change your veiwpoint and think of religion maybe as a product, it is able to deliver services that are not easily found elsewhere like the type of influence that people usually like to use individually or in groups and I meant control as in control of ones life or influence over a given group of people to a useful end, .I don't know what type of proof to give in this situation, but if you look at the examples i am giving, you will see what i am talking about.

Hopefully a time comes when the religions our society relies upon are not the bloody, murdering, money hungry , children fucking ,asexual, pedophilic things we have gotten used to in this age.

You are saying that the role of religions is decreasing, well that says nothing about the trends in the religions themselves. The growth rate in majority of the religions is actually on the rise with highest increases being in Islam and Hinduism. I was surprised since in some countries, we find astronomical growth rates for religious belief. In Australia for example, we find Buddhism having a growth rate of over 80%.

Even with the advent of the modern scientific age, It is ultimately impossible to rid humanity completely of its elements of irrationality, as the supernatural beliefs involved in these religions are some of the greatest irrationality in place today.We also have to remember any religion is always changing to suite its environment, evolving to mirror its audience. As such it is not social and scientific progress that will remove religion from society, It might decrease religion's place but it will not completely remove it.

The example of Australia about the growth of Buddhism there is due to migration from the far east. If before there were 10 buddhists in Australia, and 10 more move in, that will be a 100% rise...but there will be a decrement of 10 buddhists from whence those came. This does not reflect an overall rise in religiosity in the world. You must agree that OVERALL, the world is a much more secular place now than it was 100 years ago. And if the trend continues, who can imagine what it will be like in another 100 years? Maybe religions will have become extinct.

Indeed we can see a decrease in some aspects of religion today,already we are seeing religion being sidelined more and more in debates of government, morality and even philosophy as scientific progress continues. However the prevalence of religion is another different trend and it seems to be on the rise.

According to religious tolerance site, we find that even though the biggest religion i.e. christianity is shrinking, we find that other religions like Islam have astounding growth, and there is an increase in new religions like Wiccas,New age, Neopaganism e.t.c. and resurgence of older minor religions like the tribal religions of Shamaisms and Animisms, and others like Confucianism. and even with the shrinking christian faith, we still see a great growth in smaller churches and group meetings.

We see things like the tea party being immensely popular, using things such as moral panic, mob hysteria, and incessant propaganda to build a sort of civil religion with loyal followers and big impacts.

That is why i say that even though all the religions we see might be based on falsehood and mysticim, they do offer services that are in high demand in our irrational society.Certainly as the impact of the modern scientific age continues to sink into humanities thick skull, religion will decrease but religion is unlikely to be eliminated due to progress.

Trends among U.S. Christians
Religions of the world: numbers of adherents; growth rates
http://religions.pewforum.org/pdf/re...-chapter-2.pdf

It is ultimately impossible to justify religion and its irrationality but it is important to see what is its use in society and individual life.Thankfully I am like Laplace and have no need for such a hypothesis or system.

The article was from exerts from a discussion on Mashada

2010-02-26T20:39:00.000-08:00

What is an emotional connection?
What is an emotional attachment?
What role do these things play in a relationship?

I view an emotional connection as sort of like a link between two people that lets them communicate emotions fear, rejection, hope e.t.c. If our cognitive emotions are like data and what we speak, voice, show in things like body language, written outlets like diaries, facebook e.t.c is the signal. It is inherently impossible to relate to another human being without a basic level of emotional connection. As in any Signals processing scenario, you are always dealing with Noise, signal decoding, bandwidth and more noise as such one might not be able to communicate as intended but in any interpersonal relationship whether casual or intimate, an emotional connection is inherently present whether good or poor.

I view an emotional attachment as a link between two people. This is of course an analogy since there cannot be a physical link between two people like the popular myth of the invisible string to the heart :rolleyes: but an emotional attachment is a tie to another person that is built on maybe a reliance on somebody for things like approval,trust,intimacy,security even physical material like money, shelter e.t.c. or being relied on for these things. An emotional attachment is not an intrinsic property in a relationship. It is like a bridge that is built. This is a popular view that has been adapted in the leading psychological and ethological viewpoints with the name of the attachment theory. one of this theory's basic premise says that even though some attachments like maternal ones are easy to form, All attachments are built.

To form a relationship specifically an intimate relationships, there has to be some level of emotional connection where the two beings in question have a level of understanding on the basic personalities, needs and emotions of their partners and can communicate this info to some level. There also has to be some given emotional attachment whether it is a platonic Ineffability or just a causal sex relationship(booty call) . This is part of the reason why there is a long flirting period needed to substantiate emotional attachments in human courting. All i am saying in all this is that establishing a meaningful intimate relationship requires to tons of work and patience. Patience to be able to establish a connection with someone(cause there is tons of noise!) and patience to build an attachment, to form a reliance on your patner that is beyond the empty headed ,simplistic and hedonistic limerance that govern behaviors, cognition and emotions in many peoples relationships.

Pictures

2010-02-17T20:17:00.000-08:00

Here are some more photos to make the blog seem more colourful

The GT-R; I snapped a picture of it at a local dealership. These guys treated it like gold, wouldn't let a fellow even touch it, let alone taking a test drive.

My brother and sister; nice picture of them, laban will really be unhappy to see this posted!

Me and a Delorean; First time to see one of these live. I was trying to look cool but there is no way i was going to succeed with the lawn service in the back and the tahoe interrupting the shot on the road.

My tercel; Trying to replace the transmission without buying a stand. It was tiresome and unfruitful as well since the replacement tranny was faulty!

The fiesta movement; Either they were delivering these cars for display to dealers or some lucky guy all the way in alabama got a fiesta! I snapped this photo quite a long time ago though.

USF1, Go Race or Bust

2010-02-17T16:51:00.000-08:00

I have been quite interested in USF1 for a while. The First F1 team based in the USA, i hoped that it could garner an increase formula one audience where i live or at least give me a chance to veiw an F1 car in action but this sadly is not the case.

In february 2009, way before Lola,Campos-Meta(now HRT),Lotus or even the ever ready team of Pro-drive, Peter Windsor and Ken Anderson announced their intent in participating in the 2010 Formula one season. It would be American technology and American drivers going to conquer the world.It was promise, hope and change from America.With financial backers such as Chad Hurley(co-founder of Youtube), Truth be told, at that time USF1 was the best positioned privateer team.Mad Max(Max Mosley) had decreed that 2010 would bring a two tier system with the cheaper tier being subjected to as budget cap with a maximum of about 50 million( well in the price range of the new team) but given more technical freedom and the other tier being limitless in budget but limited in capabilities.For example there was to be more KERS power, AWD and unlimited revs allowed for lower tier teams but not for the more pricey category. As such it would be possible for privateer teams to compete with the big teams. With America in support partly due to Ken Windsor's influence through speed programming, It was quite a great opportunity for the team.
However the doubts about this team started appearing quite early. First of all there were huge logistical problems with setting up a team in America. This was the first team ever to try and be stationed outside Europe which is a monumental hurdle in itself. Current teams have a big problem even with circuits in Europe. Coordinating convoys with race equipment, spares and tools even for a top team is a huge task. When we start talking about non-European races, you have to think about designing cargo crates, we have to talk about renting planes etc. And even if they did have an office in Europe like they planned,it would not the same as being stationed there.

In any case,they had the opportunity to buy Honda, Toyota and they just refused for some obscure reasons. They would have been winning Titles like brawn did instead of closing shop.

There were also doubts about the technological capabilities of the team. The team released very little material on their actual operations. But with the little they released, it was easy to see that there was a certain lacklusterness that is uncharacteristic in other teams. I am no expert but what i saw was a renovated Nascar shop with some autoclaves and cnc machines. Their partners are mostly affiliated with Nascar and alot of their staff like star designer Eric Warren came from nascar and believe me there is a huge technological,Monetary, skill,environmental and mental gap netween Nascar and F1. For example in terms of money, top teams like ferrari and mclaren can spend in excess of a billion dollars in a season while a car in Nascar costs only 7 million.

"The irony of all this is that there has been precious little in the way of formal planning and documentation. No production schedules, simply very little in the way of planning."

With all these concerns, one starts to question if they really had the ability to participate in the season. Certainly if they had the money, they could have fielded a decent entry but did they really have such funds? The Two tier system was scrapped when FOTA finally stood up to Mad Max and his diabolical plans and even though some budget cuts were instituted, the cost associated with an entry would have almost doubled. This should have been a big blow but supposedly since usf1 had been planning its entry for a long time it wasn't phased, Mr. Anderson told his employees and the public that he had a long-term budget in place. However there were serious cash flow issues within the team according to sources, there were reports of late pay cheques, lack of resources,unhappy suppliers, employees leaving in droves e.t.c. In all this Mr. Anderson stuck to his story that sponsors, partners and team were just waiting for Bahrain.When he was pressured, he admitted to some monetary concerns but he said they were secondary issue. However it has recently come to light that the budget issues were there even last year in October and with partners like Locstein bailing, there was alot of doubt of them ever making it to the grid. Some say that the whole team was in essence an idea and some scratchwork that was announced in an effort to garner support to actually create the team and go to F1?

Mr. Anderson might have seemed to be a nice all American guy that everybody likes in public but many inside sources say his governing process within the team is authoritarian and destructive.This is part of an Exclusive Interview in a German gazette from an anonymous senior member of the team.

“But because of the stubbornness of one individual, USF1 will continue in limbo until it dies,” said a source on condition of anonymity. “It has no chance while Anderson is still here. And it’s shame, the team has really come together and there’s a sense of camaraderie throughout the organization barring one person. This will be the greatest disappointments of my career if that’s the way we go down. I think some soul searching needs to be happening in the front office. Falcon 2 this is being called.”

The problems in the team gained visibility in the public eye in about January when it emerged Chad Hurley had bailed out. Cutting all his association with the team, it was theorized that he was seeking an opportunity into F1 with HRT. Then Peter Windsor and Mr. Anderson came out and said that they might miss Bahrain and just go to Australia. Then after some time, they said that they would miss four races and just show up in Spain in may. By this time the FIA had gotten antsy and sent Charles whiting to inspect the usf1 entry. Nobody knew what he saw but it wasn't pleasant, some say that they didn't have the main tub of the car in any form, and most of the mills and other machines were still in shrink-wrap; but after his visit, it was all over. The factory closed and the employees were dismissed with Peter Windsor and Mr. Anderson dropping off the radar.The most recent activity to do with the team concerns The en-signed driver Jose Lopez who is now in a huge feud with the company. It is surprising that even when the team is under they still have the manpower to update the online profile, even though it is only to remove the references of the hopeful driver.

Now in the tabloids, we hear that Stefan GP is wishing to use USF1's slot to gain entry into F1.

Stefanovic hopes that once his AMCO company has completed its takeover, it will be granted US F1’s entry for 2010 and then can begin racing.

However, it is understood that in correspondence between Stefanovich and the FIA this week the governing body’s view on the matter is very different.

Although Stefanovic believes that in purchasing the US F1 assets he should get the team’s original entry, it is understood that the FIA has written to the team to explain that the American team forfeited the entry when it failed to start the season.

Furthermore, the FIA is poised to begin disciplinary action against US F1 for its failure to make the grid – which could theoretically result in Stefanovic’s company getting dragged into any penalties that are eventually handed down if he owns the American team.

With practice for australia going on tommorow, i can only imagine what the entry would have been like, But I guess i should not count them out, Mr. Anderson has announced the intention of his team on competing in next year's f1 season in the slot they left. I admit this is very unlikely since the FIA is so unhappy with usf1 that it is looking for any legal penalties it can impose. It is as this speed report says

In order to do so, they'd have to retain a workforce that largely blames the team's two principals - Peter Windsor and Ken Anderson - for misleading and mismanaging the team's entry, re-apply through a selection process which the FIA intends to re-open for next season, and face possibly penalties from its World Motor Sports Council.

But the saga will never end for usf1 unless it reaches the grid or completely goes bust.

P.s: Check out this F1 fanatic article on usf1 about a year ago, pretty much a letter to letter telling of what occured

Christian Missionaries in Haiti

2010-02-07T17:28:00.000-08:00

My thoughts on the Christian NGO's on a previous post were quite negative, I recieved quite alot of criticisms on Mashada but i still retain alot of these veiws. A story has cropped up that might help to elaborate on my viewpoints . Recently a number of bapist missionaries from Idaho have been charged with trying to kidnap children from Haiti. They have been charged with trying to take children, some of whom parents object out of the country illegally, supposedly in the name of rescuing orphans. Even when confronted with such evidence, they refuse to admit any guilt, even the church itself support these kidnappers! The Religious convictions of these people like those of other religious fundamentalists such as those of islamic fundamentalists have driven them to act irrationally. In these peoples minds of their purposes are infallable and you can clearly see their willingness not to let anything be it the law, common sense, morality or even their own theology stand in their way, You will find the same sort of people operating religious NGO's, Church based charities and organizations extending through many the commercial and personal circles around you, some might be friends, neighbours, kin or even within your immediate family. Be wary of anything in conjunction with these people that is religious motivated. Any Action, gesture, gift, literature, emotion, opportunity linked to these sort of people might be used to ends that you might not like!

U.S. Missionaries In Haiti Charged With Child Kidnapping

US Baptists charged with Haiti child abduction face 15 years in jail

[Audio]-Some Haitians Wary Of Baptist Missionaries

2010-02-07T12:11:00.000-08:00

What is freedom? One definition it has is "exemption from external control, interference, regulation, etc." I simplify this as escape from unwanted ties. The begining of freedom seems to inherently entail a sort of rebellion or pushing back aganist forces or powers perceived as wrong or sinister. This applies in political, personal and social circles.

We can easily understand political freedom and rebellion. We are surrounded by such a virulent political atmosphere that alot of humanity can easily come to terms with it. It is hard for common people to identify with any ideology that ignores individual death but it is even harder to find many people supporting something that refuses to try and understand or in any way bellitles these struggles. We can draw examples from the civil war in USA, or world war 2 or even various dictators where the 'villains' are committing and supporting terrible atrocities like slavery or genocide or other bad things, but it is quite easy for alot of people to understand or at least sympathize with some of the 'villains" concerns.

We however are plagued to almost always misunderstand and misjudge personal struggles for freedom or personal rebellion. The reasons for this problem are not easy to understand. Is it because of the nature of individual human conscience that we find it hard to 'put ourselves in another person shoes'? Is it beacuse humanity is essentially always in a rat race to exert power and influence that many of us deem alot of this'personal drama' as silly and distracting? Is it part of an instinctive mob psychological mentality? I can't tell, but it is easily visible in practice. If a part of a country wants to break up that is easy to comprehend and rationally argue about, but what if it is a case of an individual wanting more freedom from his family like for example, a young individual rebelling against parental or family ties,a celebrity having an affair or filing a divorce, a young man or woman's choice for sexual freedom in terms of clothing,actions and relationships or maybe it is the case of individual standing in rebellion against a country by moving away or criticizing it or in the case some given politicians escaping it? These scenarios seem alot more misunderstood by common people. There is more hatred, more overbearing moral stands, much more predisposition of thought and mindset against the 'villain' than there is in cases of the larger political factions.

These concerns are usually much higher in cases of social groupings or subcultures. If there are cases of political and individual rebellion, Is it not possible for a collection of people to have concerns that warrant them to Rebel against society? I am not referencing things like public racial and discriminational debate because the aggreable mob gabble are highly politicized and publicized and does not fit the definition i have in mind. I want examine about cases like street and prison gangs,social and religious fringe groups, cultures and subcultures that have sprung up because of these groups of people chosing to take action and not just engage in debate about convictions. Today's black street gangs such as crips,black disciples and bloods might be known alot for drug and crime ties but they begun in the 60's and 70's as groups to protect black communities aganist racial violence, police injustice and promote community interests. The situation is not the very same as those days since civil rights gained the momentum it did and gangbangin' gained the dimensions it has now but there are parallels to this in todays society. Alot of mexica gangs in Carlifornia are known for their support for immigrant welfare, opposition to deportation(They are sometimes known to hire lawyers and get legal help for these cases), racism and discrimination against Mexicans(which is very much alive), and other various social stand for the Mexican population ,legal and illegal in nature or for legal and illegal immigrants. These actions have been very much eclipsed by the crimes commitied by these societies in the media unsuprisingly. The strange thing however is that it is hard or outrightly impossible to find an understanding or even a little sympathetic position in day to day debate.Unless there are active supporters of these organizations, Most talk of such subjects carries labels similar to "Dumb nigga's feuding" or "Stupid Immigrant Beaners."

Udoubtedly it is possible to for such concerns to be possible in organizations such as Islamic terrorist organization like al-qaeda, Or fundamentally racist and bigotist organization as Aryan Nation,KKK,or even crazy Organizations such as the Nazi Lowrider but these organization seem too overly sinister and evil to warrant anything more than a passing glance.It also quite possible that i am unwarranted to use such examples due to their criminal actions, But is it OK for policemen carrying submachine guns and heavy wepoanry to attack and kill teenagers in carlifornia with nothing more than some knives and a 9 mm in the name of eradicating urban violence and not suffer even the slightest of backlash from American public? Is it alright for carlifornia law system and other states to use the crime in these organizations to unfairly imprison and judge(three strikes,gang profiling,documented police brutality) these people and the general public to be supporting them with little or no effort to understand the situation.

Since nature does not have definitions,lines or boundaries to reference for this,Can we define freedom in a way that accounts for struggles such as these? Is it not possible for an individual to break ties for the sake of freedom in non-traditional forms such as clothing, music, religion, livelihood e.t.c.? Is it not possible for us to recognize a community to seek freedom even while being able to disagree on moral standards, violent action or any harm to society. What of these entities? What is entailed in their freedom and their boundaries?

Christian NGO's

2010-01-23T18:06:00.000-08:00

The biggest topic in any conversation this time is the disaster in haiti. I was in a forum discussion at mashada on this topic and i had a disagreement with some people on there about the inherent flawedness of religious NGO's. I simply said that it was kinda sad that christians would take advantage of such a terrible event for proselytizing. It seemed that whenever i turned on any religious channel in the tv, all of their pundits are asking for funds to spread the "good news" and help their fellow churches in haiti to increase attendance and revenue through these NGO's and i thought that these funds would be better utilized if people contributed to purely secular NGO's. My comments angered alot of religious idiots and imbiceles who thought i was trying to kill jesus or something!

Your statement is in bad taste

And then they said

The incentive to help is inspired by the word or doctrine from the religion.They are helping because the faith urges so,and not because they want to spread the faith.

Christians are urged to help the poor both believers and non-believers.

Romans 5:8

But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

These are not baseless accusations,There have been many reports in the past of these organization corrupting the help they give by investing a great deal of contributed money in things like religious meetings or religious text and propaganda rather than direct aid with some of these organizations having very sininster goals like trying to actively uproot and destroy native religions or in even more extreme cases helping bring foreign political systems to by creating political turmoil to destabilize native gorvenment. When i tried to tell these guys this, they did short of calling me satan

That is a fallacy crated by atheists in an attempt to discredit and impeachable religion.Christian doctrine preaches about free choice.We are not like atheist nazis who coerced some europeans into their fold.

So I did a couple of google searches and i found some material to prove i was not lying, i found out for example that George Bush had to distance himself with Billy Graham, one of the most famous evangelist in the world who got alot of criticism when he suggested that the United States should use NGO's to make the Iraqi people more amicable to democracy by spreading Christianity to their citizens, his son has been a huge factor against the backlash to NGO's in Sudan, and their church, the Southern Baptist Convention has been famous in the US. for their spirited practice and defense of proselytism .There have also been armed resistance to these organizations in Sri-Lanka, Sudan, Thailand, Afghanistan. There have been various allegations against such major organization like world vision or christian disaster response intl. Of proselytizing with proof! In addition alot of countries have outrightly stopped giving missionary visas and are heavily monitoring these NGO's. Some countries like Uzbekistan have thrown out a great number of ngo's on these charges! At this point, these guys at the forum did a complete about turn and surprisingly started supporting these NGO's

Jerry D has made the claim that atheist countries are supporting aid relief in Haiti more than religious countries. He's also joined hands with Kinango123 in attacking Christian charity missions because they go there with the primary purpose of proselytism

My handle is kigango123 by the way

A christians priority is to save life,i hope you know that life comprises of 2 distinct forms.Mortal and Immortal.

-----

What drives a christian to help the poor is faith,and faith itself comes through hearing the word of God.The word of God is in the bible.Whatever version you are refering to just quote a verse in it that says something about not helping the poor.If you can prove that from the doctrine you win the case,but if cannot,you have no case here.Its like a case of an atheist protecting gays rights then i conclude that all atheists are gays.

-----

are the christian NGOs committing any crime by helping and counselling the Haitians? What if some of the people being helped are christians and need the encouragent from a brother or sister? If they were trading help for faith i would have issues.I just believe firmly that most of the victims would require spiritual guidance during such difficult time.

It was clear that the rules regulating NGO's were unclear so i tried to elaborate them, as i understand it is against the law in many countries that these organizations are in to make use of their NGO status to spread religion. There are statutes set forth by the UN that prohibit this! These faith based NGO's are required to sign a Code of Coduct prohibiting this. If anyone wants to embark on evangelistic mission(proselytism) there are legal mean like the missionary visa but basically these organization are lying to the public, misusing donations and sometimes gorvenment money and disobeying the law by doing such things, all of which is ILLEGAL!!!!!! Like the guys who have been in jail in korea,china, zibabwe and even malaysia.The simple matter of fact is that if I were contributing money, i would want it all to go to direct aid not preaching! During colonial times, there were cases where people in africa were denied food,clothing,medicine and education just beacuse they were of a different religion than the christian givers i.e. the missionaries of their times who were just out to convert people not help them. The rest of the form was filled with hatemongering, but that is typical!!

I thinks you are merely tripping yourselves trying to sound intellectual when in fact [you] are simply ignorant and unable to comprehend even smallest issue,

-----

He is simple racist and Christians should object to it

Interesting article on the subject

The discussion is still on at Mashada

USF1 and Testing

2010-01-14T22:28:00.000-08:00

As you guys might or might not know, USF1 or USGP1 is a new team in Formula One that is based in the U.S.A. This is a total first, Even Ford while competing with the jaguar name was based in Europe which is the prefered location due to proximity to tracks. USF1 was starting its testing in february and it was given a special waver by the FIA to peform its testing in AL, USA. I thought that I might take advantage of this fact to be able to for the very first time veiw an F1 car since I live in Alabama, But it turns out that USF1 or management at Barber motorsport track decided that they wanted a closed test, so no attendees. I wrote these guys a letter to try and convince them to open the test to the public, I dont know whether they will respond.

To the Guys at USF1,

Please open February testing to the public

I know that there has to be alot of pressure in formula 1 which might warrant a level of secrecy but you guys promised in the beginning to make a concerted effort to buck the trend that other teams adopt which is characterized by shrouded operations and actions with no earnest efforts to communicate with the public. You have certainly entrepreneured new methods of staying in touch with supporters by using modern media like youtube and tv patnerships(speed) but unless fans have a real and material tie to the action, They will not enjoy the same experience that the European teams are able to deliver to their fans where they are based.

To get to the Point, Why are you guys closing to the public the only opportunity many fans in america will be able to see and hear your car? This is the first f1 car in about two years to be driven on american soil (mainly due to Bernie) and it would be a great sorrow if we(the public) were unable to experience this event. Please rethink or talk with barber motorsports and open the february test to the public!

Your truthfully
Justus

Hopefully these guys open the test and I can be able to see an F1 car live in action. Write to USF1 to tell them what you think, if you can or want to.

P.S: My name(Justus) was mentioned in a related F1-Fanatic Article, Cool Huh!

Religion: Its birth, purpose and uses

2009-12-29T21:23:00.000-08:00

I follow the Non-religious nerd's blog which is a relatively new blog documenting one person's struggles aganist the bindings of religion. This guy is like an extreme atheist, sacrificing alot of comfort within his family and friends to struggle aganist the irrationality that is religion. I admire him and agree with him in some way, this is a stand that dictates to the world that it can and should immediately abandon all vespices of belief in the supernatural. This is the basis for the universal atheist argument, Abandonment of beliefs in supernatural due to illogicality and disparity to science present in these arguments. However such a level of atheist activism is fundamentally incompatible in my life. My family is Kenyan and there religion which in our circle is Christianity is highly integrated to the social identity and dynamic. Do not get me wrong, Far from implying that America is perfect. I am saying that America is more open to secularism than the third world is. In Africa, a change in religious stand is almost always guaranteed to end some friendships, increase tension in close relationships like family or kin ,start some feuds which might be bloody in some cases and generally become a big negative point in your social life. These events would be less likely in the educated, secularly organized and more stable state society of the U.S.A . However there are still quite alot of religional social structures that have a great deal of control with varying ranges of importance and influence in America and in the world which can be observed in personal philosophies and with communal ties and also even governmentally.

I recently was able to attend a newly formed church named New Life and it was quite different from the regular church that my parents take us to i.e. baptist church. The most obvious difference was of course the amount of resources and funding involved in both church. The baptist church is about 6 to 10 times larger than new life with adjacent facilities like a gym and a basketball court, meeting halls e.t.c. also it has much more sound and lighting equipment than new life. In contrast, the new life building was a single building with a small parking lot. The other noticable difference is in organization, while the southern baptist church is quite organized, new life church is disorganized and highly anarchic. The church members were doing all sort of strange things, running, babbling nonsense,doing the egyptian(literally!), waving their arms e.t.c. The thing that worried me were the children attendants. Since new life did not have a dedicated child care center, Toddlers less than five were being essentially left to their own devices running around the church playing with anything they could find. One of these kids was able to get a hold of a severed curtain rod with a silk cloth attached called the 'Spirit Flag' which is used by the church for its praising and worshiping liturgy. I watched with horror as this kid ran around with this deadly hazard while fully functioning adults did nothing but continue with their stupid praise ritual of doing the Egyptian with their eyes closed. When I contrast these two religious organization's place in the local community , it brings to light some of the invisible sway of religion on the state of society.

When I saw this kid's behaviour and surrounding reaction towards it, I thought of the higway that religion has built to lead the child or other children from their innocent and curious play to the hippie like belief state that leads people to go to church to do the egyptian, or babble like madmen expecting reward. Innocent but unhelpful behavior like the spirit flag waving in church is reinforced and the child is conditioned to do this, maybe with attention or praise or other emotional need from parents or other church members as a reward. Later on the child looks for reason or thought behind action, and the church being the 'helpful' guardian that it is uses emotional manipulation to encourage the child to adopt church ideology. It might for example scare the little guy with hell, or it might prey on emotions in social dynamic like fear of alienation or disgust at strange or unfamiliar attributes,conducts or traits or yearnings for friendship,communion and even companionship to woo the kid into Christianity. In general, The religious community will exert its accumulated influence to modify this kid's mindset little by little shaping the resulting adult human into a cog for their respective religious structure. This theory seem non-representative of the espied role of the church and counter-intuitive to common logic of causation but it is important to analytically think about these organizations not merely believe common logic. It is also important to note that most psychological theorems agree,social forces might be triggers but they usually are not usually causal agents. We can more accurately observe and account for the efficacy relation in social forces with a perspective of correlation. In this case, The parents of this kid were staunch christians who encouraged the kids playfulness instead of discouraging it for obvious safety and civil reasons and furthermore would undoubtedly reinforce church theology irregardless of observed logical fallacies . The pastor who had observed the behaviour of the child, rather than stopping the kid from playing with dangerous objects(spirit flag) used this event as an opportunity to call the parent infront of the church to point out some obscure "truth" about god's will he had seen in the child's eyes. It is kind of ironic and sad at the same time since the pastor seemed to care more about to unraveling estoric truths from the little kids eyes rather than helping protect them from the danger of being impaled by the spirit flag the kid was holding, all the while responsible and grown human beings around the child became nothing more than safety hazards doing their crazy dances with closed eyes.

As such we can say that in general, religions specifically in our case christianity has a considerable amount of power or influence in the individual lives of its followers, at times being agreeable but sometimes not. It is undoubtedly correct to say that the people who take advice from the church are somehow manipulated for the churches benefit with and without their knowledge. In today's society, American Christianity fosters in church going individuals opposition to evolution ,reprogenetics, rational study of the cosmos and many other things, in general the scientific spirit or basic scientific tenets . The religion also promotes certain political and cultural veiwpoints, the church for example is a key player against homosexuality and abortion and safe sex and promoting homophobia, sanctity of life and abstinence. Christianity is also pointed as a quick fix for many issues, Pastors and preachers all over America hail their christianity to be able to heal relationship woes, mental sickness, disabilities or illnesses whether curable or terminal. The power of this religion in individual lives is terrifying!

In this particular service, a teenage boy was being prayed for because of a medical issue. There were others like a woman with knee problems or a guy with financial troubles but the young mans case is more analogous to many christian believers. Dozens of people surrounded the boy and masked him with their hands. One of the older men got hold of one of the dangerous spirit flags and started waving it around presumably collecting the invisible holy ghost for him and they then proceeded to ramble quite loudly herded around this young man. Thinking of the expectations ,fear,hope and confusion surrounding this young man and his family was saddening, how would it affect him when the supernatural beliefs fail him? How was he feeling then and how would he be feeling after the inevitable letdown he will experience? It reminded me of another time when my parents took me to a church which was resided in an african american community in Mobile. The pastor of this church being more socially vocal of his beliefs than I was used to insisted on laying his hands on me for whatever the reason, which I refused since I was a professed atheist and it made me quite uncomfortable. The pastor then took it upon himself to come to my seat to do his mumbo jumbo for me! He purposefully ignored my wishes just to probably increase his influence in the church, I was so angry at this pastor guy, annoyed at being at the church, paranoid and fearful that I might be doing something sacrilegious that might offend the church and my parents at the same time ,my brother was seated next to me laughing his ass off! The encounter was vexing! Trying to wisely and analytically solve your personal issues while dealing with the frankly irrational atmosphere of the yelling, preaching and dancing of the egyptian that is religion and coming up with a logical solution is quite difficult and takes a negative toll on ones good spirit and happiness. It is sad then for me to point out many people are only doing this dance (of religion) because of the manipulative and bordeline portentous powers that Christianity or religion has in their individual life.

If religion has this much influence in our individual lives, how much power does religion have in society? There were three schools of thought in classical sociology, each led by its own influential philosopher, each with their own view of religion role in society. Karl Marx was arguably the most known of the three philosopher, known more for his controversial theories of class struggles he however had dedicated himself to "doing morally-neutral sociology and economic theory for the sake of human development" to aid the upheaval of capitalism, he subsequently made postulations on religion to aid the revolutions he saw as inevitable. In this framework of mind, Marx viewed religion as a tool capitalism used to mollify grievances of economic and social inferiority from the common man by creating different dimensions albeit imaginary that the poor guy could compete if not defeat the rich guy i.e. spiritual riches. This sentiment of religion being used quite often in individual life as a tool to assuage perceived problems,injustices or distresses is widespread in the atheist realm. One of Karl Marx famous lines used repeatedly in many secular publications reads "religion is the opiate of the masses" hinting that even in sociology, religion is thought of to an extent as a delusion useful to some.

Many sociologists however were less concerned with the mindset of the individual or the thoughts or forces bringing about religious belief but more with the functions of religions in general on its respective societies. Emile Durkheim, one of these early positivists insisted that religion is not restricted to the imaginary. Religion according to him was an expression of society. After studying religion in primitive Aborigine societies, he postulated that beginnings of religion was when "We perceive as individuals a force greater than ourselves, which is our social life, and give that perception a supernatural face." Durkheim's Ideas are hard to grasp at first since his ideology and wording terms society as collective conscience and includes complicated ideas of moral, economic and labor regulation but his ideas are easier to see in practice. He links the complexity of religious structure in society to the complexity in society for example While primitive tribal societies usually have totem-like animistic religions, Complex societies i.e. State societies are usually dominated by highly complex more universal religions usually deisms. Even in singular cases, if we were to define what church or personal religion means to the individual, the most important and visible tie probably would be in regional,state, social lines rather than universal absolutist terms . Durkheim never set a rigid definition of religion though, causing subsequent sociologist to use his ideas for behavior surrounding civil religions i.e. fans of automobiles or music or movements or even sports teams and emotions like patriotism e.t.c.. His ideas however have have alot of credit for shedding light to the obscure role that religion many times usually occupies as the effective face and identity of society.

All these analyses major on looking for general truths in many religions, however it is more likely to find specific truths about a religion by studying each specific religion individually. The great antiposivist sociologist Max Weber pioneered this systematic study of religion, he did not believe there was alot of causation in relation with these social organizations rather more in coorelation as such rather than look for hard social facts, he looked for links, list of events, cummulative sentiments, emotions or other factors in history by following past,present,communal and environmental trends.He postulated that one must examine each religion to find the distinct forces behind it to fully understand it. This philosophy is more famous under the german term that he used "Verstehen" or a more ambigous term i.e."Methodological Atheism". The basic tenet established by Weber is to make religious sense of each religious sentiment, motivation or action in its own context. He reasoned that due to the many various influences on religious theology through individual, communal, communal and maybe even primal forces, The architectures or articles of truth of the many religions of the world are virtually impregnable to sweeping simplifications of causes,belief structuring or systematized continuation epistemes like the ones presented by many sociologist. In the process of leading by example, Weber researched and wrote alot about the world religions in his time; Hinduism, Buddhism, Puritanism(and its Influences on capitalism); however his research is not really in use today. It is mostly only his ideas that have survived.

As such religions role in society is usually quite wide spread and hard to determine in each case. To muddle the scenario further, There is alot more modern and raw data that are produced on this subject by modern anthropology than there is by sociology, in fact most of today's research on religion is conducted in the field of anthropology but due to the many intersections to other studies is used in other fields. There have also been influential thoughts presented by anthropological sources contained in many ethonograpic studies, comparative religion study,phenomenology of religion ideology,the rational choice theorem where religion is veiwed as a system of bodies of language and practices that compensate for some physical lack or frustrated goals and alot more ideas that assists in the understanding of the subject, however the efforts in this essay have limited goal of just understanding religions place in individual life and society. The ideology in anthropology are also much harder to grasp and do not expressly concern themselves with understanding religion in society unlike ideology in classical sociology.

According to all these sociological theorem, Religion's role in society has alot of groundwork in fundamental nature of individual human being. My own personal opinion of religions role in society is the same as the way i view a series of controllers. The life of a person is a great experiment, From childhood, people are generally pushing button and observing reactions. Children being motivated by curiosity are the greatest button pushers. They will experiment with anything, from two cups and a string to their mothers wellbeing and sanity for any reaction they can get. Then as they grow up they learn certain niches or vices or routines of buttons they can use for their own specific purposes like how they can exert influence on other people for their distinct aims using these buttons. There are many devices to be used in this nature finances, emotions, physical objects e.t.c. But religion is one of the greatest tools known personally and socially that can be used to acheive these type of goals. The fundamental nature of religious beliefs or faith by definition almost always implies certitude even where there is absence evidence or proof. As such an individual follower of a given religion is unlikely to question his or her religious doctrine on a given view the same way he or she examines normal veiws making it possible that in an aggregate sense religion can be and is used as a sort of manipulator, An ordered set of knobs,buttons and switches used for many purposes whether personal,national or any other goals in any other category.

In todays society, we see various uses of religion. For example, many people agree that Religion has great use as a mode of relegation of culture. Rituals, ideas, views, words and text are usually passed down from generation to generation with religious context before gaining a place in secular society. In other cases religion can be used to encourage, defend and justify almost anything from negative sentiment to questionable action (Religious terrorism). Religion has also had extensive use in politics For example, there has been no outright non-Christian american president, and even though there have been some atheist and Muslim(Keith Ellison) senators, they have been in the minority.In speeches or public forum, prayer or religious language is usually used(Obama's Afghanistan Speech, Bush's War On Terror speech). It has been in great agreement that there have been many regimes that have used religious argument for control historically that jewish kings doctored religious text to increase their dominion on their subjects, also there have been and still are a number of religious states.

After the visit to New Life, my parents have gone back to the local baptist. I am as such able to compare these two churches in more detail. While the atmosphere at New Life seems more young and vibrant, the future of The southern baptist group is more brighter.This is due to the organization present in The Baptist Church. For example Last sunday when we went to the baptist church, we were ushered into their youth program for bible study. Then instead of normal bible study, the teacher decided to read us a christmas story, A really heartwarming story about a given woman benefits from philanthropy during christmas.It was really a touching story but its content has nothing to do with the point i am trying to make. The story being told in the baptist church is one of many examples of a tradition being relegated. Even though the teller of this particular tale and other similar tales might give personal and religious reasons for it , Max Weber would probably say that we can analytically surmise the purpose it has and see that it is a component or one of the tools used to create comfort, warmth and good cheer in the church to lure and insulate attendants away from their seasonal difficulties, be they winter blues,yearly or monthly financial difficulties, new year worries and/or the general commercial atmosphere that currently surrounds x-mas. There can be no analogue group session in New life for there is no bible study and the whole church is relatively new and non-denominational as such there are no agreed upon tradition or set procedures to use in this holiday.

This difference in organization is not only seen in tradition and theology, but it is also present financially,physically and communally. The budgets at the baptist church would seem more balanced and rigorously checked than in new life to the casual observer. The seating arrangement present and also buildings are better at the baptist church as compared to new life, The baptist church has even hires police officers on sunday to help cross the road. The baptist church has a notably well organized online community with myspace and facebook chapters as well as sponsoring various community functions while the new life church probably can't even compare. I could further illustrate my point by comparing communion in the two churches, In The baptist church communion is a highly scripted event. Each usher knows where and when to pick up what plates, where to pass them and when to pass them and when to receive his communion. In new life church the ushers were fumbling and almost tripping over each other taking over twice the amount of time ushers at the baptist church take to collect the plates from the pastor, My parent got the bread plate about five times without receiving the wine plate at all which was midly disheartening and confusing, during actual partaking of communion it could be noticed that the choir at new life had very poorly tuned instruments since even when the choir members stopped playing their electric pianos, a preset echo feature kept producing sound for about 3 minutes afterwards.The same could be noticed from other facets of their organization i.e. we had to remain outside in the cold till the beginninng of the service due to tardiness of the ushers,the toilets were not that clean,the power point presentation in new life church seemed of poor quality e.t.c. As such it is easy to point out which church is part of a 42,000 church Christian denomination and which is a non affiliated singular entity.

If we step back and look at the dynamic from a wider lens, it is clear that religious structures have alot of influence in their enviroments whether tribal, communal, national, continental or any other body that shares religious organization. Religion in way can be veiwed in a general sense as this mass of interests and/or conglomeration of emotional energy that has the will and power to affect human society positively or negatively. Christianity is the greatest of modern religions and as such it can also be categorized to be of this format. I wish to point out that this religion has had great consequences good and bad on the world and that its function and role in our society will continue to grow and change in the near future. If we examine the southern baptist convention's place and history within america, It is amazing to point out that Bill Clinton,Al Gore, Mike Huckabee and Jimmy Carter are well known southern baptist members. It is also interesting to view the relationship between political leadership and the Southern baptist leadership. Billy graham, A key southern baptist leader and founder has had a personal audience with every sitting United States President from Harry S. Truman to Barack Obama. He has also been instrumental in some of these political candidate's election and re-election bids. His most notable influences was with president Nixon where he was an official advisor, and even once being offered an ambassadorship position.His son has also been widely recognized in political circles while also being criticized for having a role in violence in Sudan's Darfur conflict by defending proselytism and refusing to aid peace negotiations. There have been other great church leaders that have been recognized politically. There have also been a great many state governors that participate in or at least take advice from the southern baptist convention. Barring direct political involvement, the Southern Baptist denomination is a great lobbying force aganist abortion, homosexuality and immigration legislation and uses its power with word of mouth and in the fourth estate(press) for these purposes.It is only in the last weeks of 2009 that the southern baptist convention is officially apologizing for endorsing slavery in the past.

This level of influence is present throughout the history of religion in this case, christianity and its many branches. The Roman catholic church, undoubtedly the greatest religious force to date has had a historical cornucopia of activities in this aspect. It had great power in the roman empire, retained alot of this power throught the ages in many of the western states, was key in the inquistions, witch trials, great exploration e.t.c. It still fully controls a country, and retains alot of influence in other countries. The East orthodox church has had a similar history and probably even greater since it is older and arguably more spread out in the world than even the roman catholic church. We can trace similar patterns within Anglican, Apostolic, Oriental and other church Denominations.

The purposes and aims religion seems to entail then are mixed. Even though beneficial actions that can be derived out of the good that is referenced by religious thought, It can be noted that sometimes with good wills and intents we find ourselves using religion for morally disagreeable goals and intents or sometimes bad and outrightly sinister sentiments and emotions have been used to lead the world forward.This is referenced in Durkheims who says that religion is a view that gives light to the elements of society with a supernatural face. It is therefore imperative to thoroughly examine and not ignore proof whether scientific, social or simply logical in respect to religion since it is possible for religion to have influence over you, the individual or us, the community that you would not want it to.

Atheist Blogroll

2009-12-05T11:04:00.000-08:00

Leadfeeet's blog has been added to The Atheist Blogroll. You can see the blogroll in my sidebar. The Atheist blogroll is a community building service provided free of charge to Atheist bloggers from around the world. If you would like to join, visit Mojoey at Deep Thoughts for more information

This tool was and still is a really helpful service for me in my fledgling days of my veiws and also in my day to day life when i want to fabricate or express a particular veiwpoint.

Blathering theist Jaundices

2009-12-04T18:07:00.000-08:00

I originally started posting on Mashada.com just to amp Traffic on my Blog, but I have increasingly been spending alot of time posting on the forum. My self proclaimed war on irrationality in the many guises it comes in I.e. religion, wish washy treatise e.t.c is still going on, as such it was logical to post my postulations and opinions on the forum. I am not dominating the talks in any way, but I will try and post the most juciest sections I contributed to.
From "What is the atheist's cure for mans suffering?"

Jasakwa:

Now that minds have debated for long the theist's reason for disasters and suffering of mankind in the world i think its only fair that we also hear what atheist's solution is for the human suffering on earth.

Bible reader:

The great religions of the world have already found the solution to it all.

You have not mentioned even a single solution from Atheists perspective.

My Answer:

What in the world do you theist want? The religious christians who asked this question probably grew up hearing that God or Jesus or Santa will wipe away the tears of each and every person in his fancy skyland with personal baby cribs and pacifiers for each and everyone of us and he will personally build dozens of angels to sing to us and rock us to sleep!. My simplication simply does not do this Philosophy justice, it is beautiful! I too want to escape from all the worldly worries and problems like war,poverty or disease to be comforted by Beautiful angels with Big Bobbies but it is unlikely to happen!!

Secular Humanism Does not Build these whimsical metaphorical castle in the sky, so people view atheism, agnosticism, skepticism and related philosophies as cold uncaring nihilistic bleak outlooks to life. But democratic secular humanism builds on ancient philosophies like Confucianism (a secular Buddhist like philosophy advocating building our heaven on earth)or Carvakan ideology to advocate free inquiry,separation of church and state,ethics based on critical intelligence,religious skepticism and human welfare

I view this as an assertion of rationality. Religious theorems are not as coarse and chaotic seeming as secularism,However The most reliable and powerful attribute of humanity is not blind dogma, illogical emotionality ("The greatest thing in this world is Love" ) or elusive supernatural beings.The most reliable attribute that humanity has is Reason, Our ability to rationally think about each and every facet of our lives including problems,ethics,religion,disease,poverty,race,the darkness of skin or of mind e.t.c.

There is this Guy On the Forum named JackOfHearts who i kinda agree on about his veiws on theology and philosophy

Ndigila2:

I'm not sure you're in the right philosophical realm. Atheism holds rational thought as its highest authority. Here, you're holding your 'feelings' as your highest authority and subjecting your rationality to your 'feelings'. You're still religious.

JackOfHearts opinion:

I think you are falling into the trap Atl often complains about and attributing one forced philosophical system on all atheists, there's similarities but also differences. Recognizing "feelings" is not irrational, in fact "feelings" may be considered an intrinsic component to human survival that evolutionarily developed for our common protection.

These "feelings" may be an evolutionary development not easily dismissed by a contrived rationality that is strictly "survival of the fittest". As an atheist, I'm not so arrogant to assert that I can fully rationally understand all the mechanisms that led us to survive thus far. Feelings may be a huge reason why we survive (even religious feelings that I deem false), our survival is not solely dependent on our rational scientific understanding of all there is; if that was the case we'd have died out as a species long ago in our muddled superstitious past, or even before we had the mental capacity to create such superstitions

However I sligtly disagree with his opinion of feelings in role of feelings in human intra-personal and social dynamic, a point i try to clarify in my other post

My Post:

Moral philosophy along with the main cognitive emotions are portrayed by many Ideologies to set us apart from the primal and animal life. Alot of Religions and modern esotericisms build their theologies linking this difference in Morality and Rationality to the Superiority of Human beings mentally, physically or corporeally .This superiority is clear within the mental plane but it is not in the physical realm and to be frank, it seems borderline egotistic in corporeal dimensions. This is clearly seen (as can be argued by some) in ideologies of religious nature which usually have a ridiculously benign mythological construct who built humanity with an internal happy o-meter(soul) for some secret purpose which only they seem to know, which is obviously preposterous!

But the idea of moral philosophy together with cognitive emotions setting us apart is not that ridiculous, I even agree with it. As said before part of the rise of altruism in human society can be attributed to evolutionary advantage however alot of theories in play in the psychological and anthropological fields agree that the rise cognitive emotion and Moral philosophy is somewhat or somehow correlated with the rise of selective evolution i.e. These things (cognitive emotions, morality and superior intellect)could have led to where humans have a selective breeding capabilities where we could theoretically can select traits, trends and qualities we want in ourselves to breed. As such we are somehow superior to other animals but it is not due to some installed property i.e. soul, spirit(Holy spirit) or demons, it is most likely due to the human race in near literal terms wrestling control of breeding away from the process of natural selection to selective evolution

Majimboism and related ideology

2009-11-20T11:11:00.000-08:00

A highly place sentiment in today's World society is something in the lines of “Africa unite!”.The picture i put up reflects joining sentiments, however most people think of african unity in enveloping terms i.e. uniting africa into a super political continental body. On the face of it, it seems noble enough. Set aside your differences and join together. A lovely message to the right listener however distressing to the actual logically critical Africans. It seems that the central base of this position carries no empathy towards tribal society, local economic system needs, national and regional identities only specifying that everyone join up now. It is the sad result of American or more correctly western impingement on African living dynamic, the 'bigger is better' mindset towards society, government and social life characterized by brazen, careless individuality diametrically opposed toward the slow culmination of reason that characterizes regular segmented day to day life. It is these views of African segmentation in regard to tribal communities that are the subject of this article. I will try and explain my thought towards political devolution and related ideology.

If one was to show the evolution of societies, one would see a basic directional evolution. All organization begins with the simple group(family,clans,clicks,sets,gang) with little needed to bring this type of group together other than common interests whether safety,monetary, friendship, blood ties e.t.c. We then move on toward the tribal society which is an aggregate of people united by ties of descent from a common ancestor, community of customs,traditions and maybe religions, common language and adherence to the same leaders. The societies above the tribe are characterized by an increase in complication and stratification, the only similar group in Kenya that have this level of organization are the Nandi who center their spiritual leadership, civil administration and army around a single person i.e. the Orkoyoit leading to great administrational organization as noted by arabs scholars even before colonization. The most complicated form of social and political organization so far recognized is the state society characterized by a strong centralized government with little or no individual regional independence, socio-economic class divisions , a market economy and large populations. This type of social structure distinguishes itself by centering around political structures and having ways of national self regulation i.e. standards for stuff(foods,roads e.t.c.), architectural discipline, education, law enforcement and many other methods of catering for the irrational individual.

Knowing this if it was asked “Is bigger really better ?”,what would the non-laudatory answer be? As much as I would like to rail on imperialism, The precept state model set by the western countries like U.S.A , the Euro-union, China or even USSR seems to be the winning design. Huge democratic or even communist countries with a minimum of disparaging elements and tightly controlled will or really limited choice in terms of government. The key beneath the power of these body-politics always being size. The USA is the most successful example of this with a choice of only two political parties, the country has little range of choice in direction of policy and with such a huge population it has morphed into a major power player economically, militarily and culturally. It is as such obvious that in todays current social-political climate, this model has the most advantages. These power blocs have solidarity and power in their wills, clear direction in policy and big huge armies to fuck their enemies up with. They do have various disadvantage. For example, it is theorized by many political scientists that their instabilities either economically like in the case of recurrent economic slumps and depressions(Keynesim) or in terms of political and catastrophic bedlam towards social agenda and concentration of power i.e. The USSR, The second and third Reich are inherently predisposed. However the benefits seem to be much greater than the disadvantages.

Even though the current political makeup of systems in Africa is currently inferior to the state society, it is disadvantageous and virtually impossible to establish a state archetype of government. The continent is populated with thousands of tribes each with their own sometimes conflicting interests, cultural and social dynamic and prevalent history. Beyond this level of organization, there is a different type of organization. Colonization and western expansion into Africa imposed structures of nations and sentiments like national pride onto this social dynamic, As Such the imagined united African state will never exist not because of the unwillingness of individual African governments, but due to the conflicting and individual but seemingly malignant interests of tribal sentiments of the voters that predominantly govern candidates chosen with little consideration of anything else i.e. unity of country, concerns about other regional areas e.t.c.

It is why we see ideas like Majimboism or political devolution spring up. The viewpoints that advocates increase of consideration and power to the tribal organizations that predated the national divide of Africa. The role of any government is to foster safety and public order within its controls by building systemization with a prescient of using present organization not the castle in the sky one wishes to occupy. If Kenya or African countries are highly tribalized, it seems unreasonable to maintain a government that constantly works against this organization. Modeling today's politics in Kenya, we can see it is comprised of a lot of politician using tribal sentiments to run for office, an epitome of the type of politics that have displeased the people so much. However most of us look to the politicians we voted for to improve roads in our towns or cities or to help with farming difficulties in our region. This is not a sign of weakness. This is common in almost all forms of government. Regional interests being different from national interest and in need of observant care and deliberation in terms of crafting solution i.e. individual attention.

A lot of the segmentation mentioned is political and The best course of direction would be more power towards tribal structures, However the concept of Majimboism is flawed. Political devolution would mean segmenting ruling power around tribal lines, however today's Kenya is not primarily tribal. The birth of the country after our independence in 1963 brought together the different regions and tribes giving way to the gentrification of predominantly tribal Kenya to a Kenya today that has quite a lot of ethnically mixed areas and regions. Political devolution would be quite similar to ethnocratic gorvenment which is known to increase tribal strife and maybe brew conflict, increasing vulnerability to incidents like the civil conflicts of 2008 after the election. I do not want to be unfair but the few examples of ethnocentrism in gorvenment like Uganda under Idi Amin or even South africa's apartheid are not that great. Political devolution also would be intrinsically complicated and unfair. Bigger tribal structures would gain more power and might not put this power to best of uses. i.e. unfair dividing of resources between regions, like natural resources, rivers,minerals e.t.c. or even more land disagreements. This type of organization is also redundant since such specific organization within government already exists in the name of chiefs, D.O's and D.C's of Kenya who are primarily there to cater to specific regions and their demographies.

What is needed is Economical organization for tribal structures i.e. economic deviaing up. Does it not irk any person out there that religious structures that are largely here to organize people by sponsoring irrationality (supernatural bullshit) and non-profit organizations here to give people useless paraphernalia like poor quality clothing and limited food supply get to pay no taxes, yet the structures who do have the power to ebb social ills i.e. the tribe has very little or no economic leeway. When the white guys give you their stupid bibles and used underwear you (Kenyan Government) give them a free pass on taxes however the gueth makech or the coinage set forth by western society is taken away from the Luo people so they have nothing to contribute to private sector efforts like Aga Khan hospital enterprise in Kisumu or Nyanza's healthy water project which have appreciated impacts on health and poverty. Is it also not possible for the Kikuyu people to make their own contributions to improving cattle breeds or increasing distribution of fertilizer and pesticide with a little bit of leeway from the KRA?

It is imperative that the Kenyan or more to the nub African governments take an active role in fostering the organization and growth of our tribal structures in the only field that has measurable bearing in todays society i.e. standings in the market economy. Without this, it is hard to be optimistic for the future of the African tribe. I do not know about you guys I do not want the Kikuyu language and culture to be a relic of the past. I am sure all of you guys would say the same for your particular tribe, as such we must get merchantilistic organization in place for the underlying tribal structures in Africa countries from our governments in our case being the Kenyan coalition government. If not there may not be a Kikuyu or a Ja-luo or a Kalenjin culture or any other tribal culture to talk about in 2309.

This is also the only realistic way we can expect Africa to unite. Under the common interest to prosper the next step for Africa would be to build a continental economic body that could not only regulate and encourage trade but make groundwork for a collective African identity as such striving forward to a more rational and understandable human identity.

P.S: participate in the forum discussion
also check out the gerbil below!

Analyzing social Forces

2009-10-28T13:07:00.000-07:00

There are active working forces in our day to day life.If we examined them we would find an all too ignored cartogram that shows a social map of tendencies of inclination,interests,ideologies,business practices,cultural movements and many other forces behind the complex tentative equilibrium in today's day to day society. It is common place to grumble about viewed social injustices with little reason and/or not looking at the underlying causes with enough situational analysis. My most recent feud or beef was with the patent system. I fully support the cause of the P2P cause, it is unimaginable that media cost has bludgeoned to such heights that the average low to working class family cannot afford two hours worth of entertainment per week. They say that the producers and cinemas have similar financial stresses too but that is horse crap, even with the recession at its worst most report that instances monetary hiccups in the film industry were negligible prompting forums and journalist to comment that the film industry was “ at worse, recession-resistant and, more optimistically and historically, has actually been recession-proof.”

However there is also the flip side of the patent system where it regulates effectively. I had recently bought After market control arms for my acura which was a big deal for me. These front upper control arms for my Acura integra would offer quick change camber capabilities which are approximately worth 0.05 to 0.1 g on a lateral skid pad and worth about 3-5 seconds on a well suited 2 minute track.This is alot of promise for a car like Mine. However due to stupidity and lack of money, I decided not to buy a brand name item and instead buy a cheaper imitation item that offered similar capabilities. Taking great pain and effort, I installed these arms on my car, I had to borrow jacks and working space from a friend, skip school and deal with many other quibbles during installation but I finally did it. However the problems that cropped up afterward were so tiresome and seemingly unsolvable that I got fed up and six months from purchase I had to remove and discard the arms. First there was not ample suspension play room, this was due to the inferior design of said product i.e. placement of quick change camber adjustment screws was in the wrong place, so I had to increase the front ride height at the expense of my struts. Second there was irreparable damage to my drive shafts during installation process which caused me to shell out a considerable amount of cash for repair of said shafts, all due to no installation procedures from control arm manufacturer. Third the product itself with its flawed design was not built up to its own flawed specification. So the screws, built out of very malleable that did not have needed holding capabilities required to function consistently as such when I set the camber required for daily activities the screws holding the product slid and setting was lost in about 2 days time.

These problems had been solved by the brand name manufacturer's product due to regulations in patent system that made manufacturer accountable for his or her product. Sadly the product I bought was from a Taiwanese imitation manufacturer who used a loophole that did not require following the actions required by the regulation body for regular car parts manufacturers. These imitation companies are forcing real brand name companies with quality products like TRUST a.k.a Greddy (which went into bankruptcy this year) and HKS(which in 2009 is still going at a loss) out of business with their cheap imitation products.

As such the real situation is much more complex than imagined, Of course one could say that maybe one of these categories is wrong and the other is right, but using moral opinion into solving this calamity is hard. If we look at the situation analytically, The bad guy in the each situation is still the good guy in some way, I am sure in Hollywood there are some Movies that went bust and/or some people out of jobs because of torrenting and I am also sure that this number is increasing almost exponentially due to growth of the P2P scene. It is also valid to assume in concern with performance market that if there were no imitation products, the brand item products prices would be much more higher due to absence of competition, I bet if the Patent law was patched right to disallow foreign cheap competition right now the prices of aftermarket performance parts would most likely rise even quadruple and stay there, like in the 1990's when the sports car imports from japan first became popular.

I am sure the Patent law system will likely continue evolving and engineering the market so that entertainment can be cheaper for consumers and the market for after market performance parts will be more promising for the earnest businesses and consumers. However the girth of this essay is to point out the unapparent complexity of the situation in today's day to day living, and to advocate analytical steps into each and every cause or trend a person is associated with.

Pictures

2009-10-07T18:39:00.000-07:00

I have gotten input that this blog seems very boring,Therefore I will post some random pictures to add colour and liveliness into the blog.

An ode to boobies, Strangely it was only in america that they morphed into desirability.

Weird stuff!

My brother, He is only input I have on my blogging. Even though he think this is pretty stupid, an opinion that sometimes crosses my mind, I still go on posting stuff.

Another ode to the greatest internet meme ever, The Almanac of fail

FIA GT Championship race cars, can you identify them?

-Aston martin DBRS9
-Maserati MC12

-Porshe 911

-Nissan GT-R(even though this is from the japanese GT500 category, there is going to be a GT-R in Le Mans next year)

Bench seats!, the best automotive feature that was killed. Imagine the possible things that could have happened with those in todays cars!

This is a Poster of a Microsoft game; Rise of Nations. To me the poster was a window to humanities fears, social organization and mostly unyeilding determination found with the living's Espirit de corps

Religion is bullshit !!, The letter

2009-10-04T08:02:00.000-07:00

I take great inspiration from the atheist movement e.g. George Carlin, the source of my title is a strong minded comedian that is unwavering and analytical in every one of his routines, whether it be about philosophy or farts, Richard Dawkins a man of science who is able to seek and show truths concerning the many theories in life Evolution,religion,education, political structure and many more things. I thought i would contribute by writing a letter to my bible study teacher about philosophy. Here it is

" Dear Mr. Ashbee

I am not a Christian. I was raised as a Christian by my parents, and I was quite devote for a long time and this did quite a number on me! Christianity is way different in Kenya or other third world countries than it is here. One might follow a religion here as a matter of choice or due to other private personal causes but Back home the sophistication that has characterized religion in America to freedom was entirely absent. The whole community was Christian and if one wasn’t aligned with Christianity, one wasn’t part of the community. Anything vaguely non-christian in the community was in a devil worshiping and witchcraft category and the religious influenced mob killed many people i.e. suspected mungiki, suspected homosexuals, thieving homeless kids(we called them Chokoras) e.t.c due to this. A Mindless drove that brought the civilized world to the demogery that characterized the early church; The crusades, instances of witch trials, stoning e.t.c. I too was infected with this virulent behaviour, I was supposedly speaking tounges and had visions in form 1(the equivalent of 9th grade in U.S.A.).

America is the land of freedom, and literally for me it was freedom. When I first went into school here in 2004, there was no religious pressure, religion for the first time was just a sideshow or sometimes a prop used by kids as a personality feather. No reports of Mob violence due to religious pressure, Slander was not prohibited. No corporal punishment by teachers and community, It was freedom! Even my stout Christian parents were confused and shifted from church to church trying to regain some lost element in their Christianity, until they finally gave up and started going to the churches that had people they knew. This caused a change of attitude and a re-examination of many things, for me one of these things being religion. For a young man like me who was growing into adolescence, religion was a way for me to move away from the umbrella of my parent’s house and tutelage. So I devoted a lot of attention to it.

The human being has two analytical engines; the rational mind and the emotional system of sorting things out (EMO for short).Religion I saw and now see it is a self sustaining conglomerate of interests and emotions. Bearing in mind I am no expert in this area, I do have some postulations. As the rational mind falls prey to paranoia and other problems, so to does the EMO. Without a useful outlet for its work, the EMO system will push for something, and it is likely to be the wrong thing. I have tried to read some various psychology books and as I came to interpret it. Emotion or the collection of things I have termed EMO system is the basic drive in human life. Anger is an emotion that can be used to drive or act as a throttle for great things, but without usefulness it is dangerous and harmful. Religion In general will use these things to sustain itself.

We could Analyze how religion lives with a simple model. Using fear, Religion brings in the ignorant flock, using other emotions tied to the flock the church attains the monetary assets and support to sustain itself and using its influence on the mind to make the flock scorn anything the church sees as threatening. Albeit this is a crude Model of my theories but I think it conveys the bulk of these postulations on religion as I saw and now still see them somewhat i.e. Religion is a sort of social organism that survives on the cumulation of irrationalities found in The EMO system, irrationality being "The tendency and leaning that humans have to act, emote and think in ways that are inflexible, unrealistic, absolutist and most importantly self- and social-defeating and destructive". Such a brash and cocky theorem was bound to rustle some feathers and get me into some trouble.

I was a stupid and rash Adolescent and I wanted to test my ideology, You would think that I would go to some theological discussion in Murphy high and camly lay out my philosophy to be revised. No sir, I had to be Mr. Know it all and tell my parents about it, And to top it all off I was expecting some sort of 30 minute philosophical discussion to sum up the matter. Not surprising to say I was wrong.

My father did short of disown me, he would repeat the statement “No son of mine can be a Devil worshiper” for a number of times. My mother wept and kept her distance and left my dad to do the heavy underhanded theology pumping. For hours, each week, months in a row till was 18, We used to have the preaching sessions in my room. Every week, there was this yell from mum “Njagi, Dad wants to see you in your room” then for hours without end my father would talk about some cosmic spirit you can feel that guides everyone to happiness, I could not reply for that would prolong the misery of the talk and we couldn’t get into any sort of philosophical debate because my Dad was dogmatic in his religion and I was a flippant adolescent who knew everything so I would rebuff him in my head.

“I heard this feely stuff somewhere else, Guess where? In the Toilet when some guy was reading a comic!”

My actual thoughts were more perverse but I solder on to press a point.

“There was this guy who said he could feel bullets as they bent the time-space continuum, he tried use this ability to act as some kind of super hero, Guess how the Hero died? He was shot at point blank!! , …dramatic pause….. in the face!!!!!.”

Which was and still is my main point. As nice as these religious theologies are they ultimately are illogical, Implausible, unreasonable and are often hindrances in real life.

Seeing as the loud Preaching sessions did not work, My father tried a number of other tactics before referring to Dr. Richie, a good family friend for advise. Dr Richie then helped me get into contact with you, Mr. Ashbee and I was told I was to have a meeting with you to talk to you. You know Uncertainty is brought by many things but mostly uncertainty is brought about by fear of the unknown and unknowable. My dad being a mechanical engineer prided himself with being a scientist and he passed that pride to me. Pride of the scientific method, pride of being part of the rational movement, proud of not being an irrational or more accurately disdain of romanticism. As such I viewed myself a rational man, objective in my vision and computer like with my analysis. As soon as I was told to meet Mr. Ashbee, a little bit of Uncertainty creeped in so I solved it by being overly brave. I was gong to reason with you and show you the error of your ways, I was going to challenge you to a philosophical debate and I was going to win, to finally once and for all destroy the irrationality that had plagued me for 18 yrs.

So we met at your house and it was all very anti-climactic, You offered me tea, We talked and chatted about some few things before moving on to our main subject. To be honest I was expecting it to be like a war; you would be in armor, like armor of god with the sword of truth, belt of righteousness or faith, the whole thing and rebuke me for my insolence and I would be on the other side with my computer and geeky glasses, knowing your questions and answering all with rationality, genius and smugness. It wasn’t to be so, In fact it was rather the opposite, I was the staunch unreasonable one.

Religion strives in a non-logical mindset, This does not say anything about the context of religion indeed some religions like Christianity and select others have very rational belief structures. However in preaching and other religious discussions, method of delivery varies from a scientific debate or educational lecture. If I were to compare a physics lecture to a sermon, the physics lecturer would state the theorems he wants to convey, then provide a derived proof for this theorem and then list the application. The preacher or believer would state his theorem, but other than relying on the bible which is an invalid axiom, there would be no quantitative proof in his arguments, he would reference feelings, moral opinion and other EMO tools to persuade people to his side of the argument.

Take for Example Evolution, there is more than enough evidence to show the maturing of life over 3000 million years, the variation of genetic material throughout this time with a clear fossil record for at least 500 million of these years. There is a vividly discernable pattern in present day biological life, that points to common ancestry. Geological evidence points to Earth being about 4.5 billion yrs old. These are tenets that have been achieved by scientific research and logical and rational discussion without prepositions in thought and mindset. When I was talking to you, at the time I did not have the factual base I now possess and my thought. But even then there was no logical argument, you simply used the same tools, Exploit an EMO aspect, in that case being fear to try and bring me to the Christian side of the argument.

I do not mean any offence, But that is generally what happens in most of the conversations pitting my belief in Evolution against Theology.

“I think Evolution is a valid theorem”;

“Ohh! ,You Believe you are a monkey”;

”No!”;

“Of course We did not come from monkeys, We are special!, We were created by paranormal being (X) for (Y)&(Z) reasons.”

The Goal always being to create Uncertainty and using that to create fear or manipulate one using some other EMO tool. I was given a book called “Too much faith required to be atheist” or something to that line and as I was perusing it I came across the Evolution section. Instead of providing evidence for the Creation theorem or Intelligent Design or whatever the name is. They were listing the probability of life spontaneously 'popping up' , using factor thought needed for evolution to calculate probability of evolution. In probability, real life problems are analyzed in models with mutually exclusive and independent events not a simple list of numbers. It is fundamentally impossible to create a 100% accurate model of such a complex real event. Even when they got their false result, it is a useless number since the event in question occurred.

Pascals wager is another example, Are they (believers mainly Christians) using a tool to help one come to a logical conclusion? No, they are trying to spread uncertainty creating fear pushing people to make an unnecessary decision unwillingly, Never mind there are hundreds of other religions that could use the same argument, thus proving the invalidity of such an argument. Christians reference Einstein in their arguments, in a sort of who's who comparison of beliefs with an argument following in the line of "Yes!, even Einstein the greatest scientist in the 21st century was a believer in God!" It seems borderline silly to reduce a rational argument to name bragging, bearing in mind the scientist had a pantheistic atheist belief towards god.

When I look back at my teenage time of indecision, I only see a single figure standing as the representative of Christianity which would be you. In writing this I hope that i will rid myself the uncertainty towards the beliefs of Christianity and other paranormal belief systems by putting into light the workings of religion. The decline of the rational movement and the rise of romanticism stuttered the trend towards discovery of irrationality in human society, And the biggest irrationality that has persevered to date is religion.Gaining wings with the mindless emotionality and directionless cognition that has characterized the world after the rational movement. Religion still grows by taking advantage of the shortcomings of the EMO system to control the individual and as such religion has continued influencing the world in terrible ways till today.

P.S. I was hoping to post this letter on my blog

yours truthfully
Justus Njagi "

I also wanted to post a reply in the blog but his reply did not have any substantive points or arguments in it. If there is a quality argument, i will post it!

Frankenstein's Complex

2009-08-09T18:09:00.000-07:00

“The Frankenstein complex” is a phrase coined by the great Isaac Asimov. Asimov was tired of the science fiction being derailed from rational speculation of the future to being the voice of mindless fear and paranoia towards technology. The phrase was derived from Mary Shelley's literature in essence captures the fear that opposes progressionism In modern times This Frankenstein complex has enveloped life in the 21 century to being a bottleneck to progress and science. Caution is needed in many occasions but this Frankenstein complex has taken a lot of minds aloof.

The global warming crisis for example is hogwash perpetuated by this complex. I do not claim to be an expert or even that knowledgeable to this subject, but there are many fallacies in the theories and action related to global warming. There has been extensive research documenting an increase in atmospheric temperature coinciding with an increase in carbon dioxide. Wikipedia graphs plot global surface temperature increasing in a logaristical fashion, while carbon dioxide increases likewise in a approximately linearly.This data has prompted many studies and due to all this frenzy, the global warming theorem has been created and the cause has been attributed to technology.

The component that is supposedly causing this increase according to this theorem is excessive Co2 . First there are other theorems that attribute this temperature increase to solar flaring and other things and regard increasing carbon dioxide as a bi-product. They have been ignored in light of global warming. Regardless If carbon dioxide is the culprit, the man-made output is estimated to be about 26 Gt. Output and most of this is attributed to heavy industry, Energy production not light transportation or residential output. The natural carbon dioxide cycle involves about Terratones of Co2 . Expending magnitudes of effort saving a few megatones in personal transportation while barely monitoring Heavy industry seems illogical.

Secondly when any positive action to solve the problem is set in progress it has to cuddle these fears instead of directly dealing with the problem. Restricting emissions and complicated taxing ventures to curb emissions seems fine to most, but concrete measures like cloud manipulation and iron seeding receive staunch resistance. As such, the ruthless use global warming as a vice while the scientific community is left to try and solve this illogical problem with fart cans(mufflers) and spray restrictions

Undoubtedly this has been more about global warming than elaboration of Asimov's phrase Frankenstein Complex, but as another great science Frank Herbert fiction writer said “Fear is the Mind Killer” . Is it not better trying to solve this bungle with a clear mind than to muddle through the problem like society has done for the last three decades

my sources are Wikipedia and some other obsure site

My World Is Gangsta

2009-07-16T23:29:00.000-07:00

The Political structures in place in the world are systematically taking to account the individual in their workings. The law is moving from a shepherd of the illogical human flock to a huge direction pointer in the irrational individual. Giving examples with current situation in homosexual policy in governments, the government has abandoned its way of slowly directing population count, opinions of general public and using other such mass manipulation techniques that discourage homosexuality and such other behavior that increase trends of aspects that are not necessarily seen as helpful in general human populace . Now the governing bodies in place are slowly embracing the wants of the individual, catering for homosexuality and other such things as feminism, current regulation in areas to do with safety, morality, Demands of social nets(public health care), disability care, and many more things.

This is partially due to the power of the individual. The onset of the Internet and other related devices and services connecting the individual to the world, the press , the amount of firepower the individual can possess and amount of damage the individual can produce to todays fragile society are great powers. As such the ruling structures in todays world are now vying for more power on the individual. Freud gave great insight in the individual drive, but the greatest truths about the human being came from John Locke who theorized the individual generally is a tabula rasa, a blank slate at birth whose venerable mind could be fashioned in any way or form if a great enough force is exerted. As such the individual today is subject to screaming mainstream media that usually promotes the ideology of the ruling structure , Overbearing Law enforcement of the current day that discourages wavering from accepted dogma and generally micro manages the individual , biased and harsh law system that prunes any unwanted part in the general populace.

As such the opinions and problems in the government have a disturbing part in the people. Racial prejudice, capitalist agenda , religious leanings, ethnic hatred, political ideology and other such things have effect on the individual. They are smeared on anything in the media, used to influence the law and percolate in anything and everything around the individual. It does not matter on the form of government; dictator, communist or even democracy. In the United states, We have the infamous Fox news :the republican mouthpiece , MSN: a staunch democrat supporter and various other biased standings in the media. The 'Popos' are a hateful and racist organization and the policy of the law system over here is three strikes and you are 'out ' as I heard. In the face of such an overwhelming force, I the individual must push back must take my stand.

As I see it, this ideal civilized lifestyle that has overtaken life in America is an all too ugly facade designed as a brainwash and leash . The kindness and lovey duvey shit of their so called civilized world is purposefully aganist the grain of the base order of humanity, I am an animal, a selfish and sadistic asshole, uncultured with powerful and uncontrollable sexual urges, I need to let out and bring forth these things not them brew behind this 'gentleman' label. These ideologies are the things that have given birth to the homosexual hippie like atmosphere that surrounds philososphy in America.

There is also an avid aversion to Disagreement that at times seem downright ridiculous. Disagreeing with a person in america is like trying to shit an unsliced watermelon, Either anything meager degrades to mindless violence or your disagreement drives the other person away or into some sort of coccoon mode. In any other place, disagreements are part of life and if violence is needed most nothing turns into a crapshoot as fast as in america.

Gangstarism as i see it is a resistance to this 'civilization' of oneself. An accumulation of philosophies that force you discard the love and need of comfort for surrounding community and society in the face of the urgency and seriousness of one's own need. whether Worship of violence, Worldly Comfort and sexuality or resistance to the Law, Need for Money and Need to hump something however you might put it, As i see it these need have outweighed any concern about the world ten times over. That is why i Say my world is Gangsta.

p.s. The word Gangsta has many violent connotations, Each has his own so do not go associating me to some obscure italian mafioso. No sir, i deeply resent that.

p.p.s I also don't sell drugs