Why to Live

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!

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!

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

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

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

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

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.

OR

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.