Over the past few years I've been reading fewer new books. New fiction is, for the most part, self-indulgent, meaningless narcissism wrapped inside a veneer of pretentious twattery. And non-fiction has taken to become more like fiction.
Take a look at books from a few decades ago. Greats like Isaac Asimov wrote great fiction, and also great non-fiction, and you could tell instantly which genera you were reading. Today that line between fiction and non-fiction has blurred to the point where memoirs contain largely fabricated material and novels contain pages of footnotes and references to news articles and scientific papers.
One great example is The Great Hedge of India by Roy Moxham. You start with a fantastic premise: the second largest man-made barrier the world has ever seen was once a giant thorny hedge that ran across India and today almost no one knows anything about it. Then you read the book and 80% is the author talking about himself, his travels, and his research in writing the book you are now reading. Almost nothing about the book is about the hedge itself, the book is little more than a self-referential exercise in seeing how recursive a book can be by referring to itself and the process of writing it as much as possible.
Or The 37th Parallel by Ben Mezrich. The premise is fantastic: UFO sightings and animal mutilations cluster around the 37th parallel, which is the same area where most secret US military bases are located. You then read the book and you find absolutely nothing on the phenomenon of the 37th parallel until the very last chapter. You find very little about UFOs either. Almost the entire book is about a crazy man who lost his job because he was obsessed with UFOs, the furniture he bought his wife to get her to stop nagging him about his obsession with UFOs, the misadventures he had with his equally crazy sister, and the billionaire frenemy he has who started a top secret corporation that works with the government to build private spacecraft. And it's not even written like a biography, it's written like a novel where the author injects his personal opinions throughout. About 10% of the book is fact, the rest is a story with a plot and characters and a twist ending and melodrama concocted to sell books.
Michael Drosnin's Bible Code series contains a handful of intersting facts about a statistical study of the Torah woven together with a whole heap of narrative about how the author is Indiana Jones and has to save the world. Elaine Pagles' books on early Christian history similarly contain as much narrative about the author's own quest to research and write the books as actual history.
New non-fiction has being transformed into some sort of quasi-fictional "thriller" where a kernel of fact is sewn into a narrative with characters and settings and PG-13 dialogue in order to appeal to the dumbed down twitterati and snap-crackle-and-pop chatters with three second attention spans and fifteen word vocabularies who like mass-market corporate "edgy" comedy vomit. Ten page magazine articles are expanded with loads and loads of filler to create 250 page books so wannabe Hollywood screenwriters can keep their heads above water.
Showing posts with label Other. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Other. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 30, 2018
Wednesday, October 17, 2018
Deadhead Mountain
Donnie Eichar in his book Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident, tries to censor everyone who reveals the bullshit "secret" "true" reason behind why 9 experienced skiers died in the Ural mountains mysteriously. He is not interested in the truth, he wants you to buy his shitty book. Well, here's the "secret" and here's why it's a total load.
The shape of the Kholat Syakhl mountain produces a Kármán vortex street when the wind hits it just right. These vortices of air generates infrasonic noise that 22% of the population are highly susceptible to (and, coincidentally, ALL 9 skiers were in that 22%). The noise causes them to go crazy and stuff ("hijacking their bodies" and "wreaking havoc on their minds") after they listen to it for a few hours. They run out of their tents naked in a panic. There was no moon that night, and the temperature was 40 below freezing. The combination of extremely low temperature and injury from bumping into things in the dark killed them.
Of course, it doesn't explain how ALL 9 of the skiers were in that magic minority that is susceptible to infrasonic waves like this. It doesn't explain why one skier was missing a tongue and another was missing eyes. It doesn't explain why they had internal crushing injuries and broken bones but no bruises or any external injuries. It doesn't explain why a few bodies had dark orange skin and were highly radioactive. It doesn't explain why no one before or since, of the thousands of people who have been there, have ever experienced this phenomenon, including the natives who live in the area, and multiple teams of researchers who investigated the deaths.
It doesn't take into account the lights they saw in the sky (which were later identified as Russian missile launches, as the mountain is near a top secret military base) and any possible motive the military would have for killing them to keep their missile tests a secret.
No reason is given why the author did not go to the mountain and set up any equipment to listen for these infrasonic waves. He's throwing away all other hypotheses as obviously wrong and setting up his own as obviously right without actually conducting a test to see if these waves are actually produced by the mountain or not? He didn't actually conduct the test? He based it on similarly shaped mountains that produce kind of similar infrasonic effects that have never ever killed anyone so far.
I shit you not.
There, I just saved you the $20 for the book and ruined the author's fun by exposing the secret ending.
Now, here's what we do know:
•FACT: This was during the coldest time in the Cold War when both the US and USSR were testing a great deal of new weapons.
•FACT: There is a Soviet military base within the vicinity of the mountains where the hikers were staying.
•FACT: There were reports of lights in the sky were confirmed to have been Soviet rocket tests.
•FACT: The Soviet Union has a long history of testing air-burst weapons such as the Father of All Bombs.
•FACT: The internal crushing injuries the skiers received are consistent with the powerful shock waves produced by these types of explosives.
•FACT: The Soviet government had every reason in the world to cover up the deaths as they had with other accidental casualties of military experiments, such as the anthrax leak at Sverdlovsk in 1979.
Can this hypothesis I've cobbled together over the past ten minutes explain everything about the Dyatlov Pass incident? No. Does it do a better job at explaining at least some of the details than the total bullshit explanation a Hollywood screenwriter came up with and repackaged as non-fiction because he wanted to get a movie deal and drum up positive press for his potential future pay day? Absolutely.
By the way, I've used first-person pronouns with less frequency in this review than the author did in the original book.
The shape of the Kholat Syakhl mountain produces a Kármán vortex street when the wind hits it just right. These vortices of air generates infrasonic noise that 22% of the population are highly susceptible to (and, coincidentally, ALL 9 skiers were in that 22%). The noise causes them to go crazy and stuff ("hijacking their bodies" and "wreaking havoc on their minds") after they listen to it for a few hours. They run out of their tents naked in a panic. There was no moon that night, and the temperature was 40 below freezing. The combination of extremely low temperature and injury from bumping into things in the dark killed them.
Of course, it doesn't explain how ALL 9 of the skiers were in that magic minority that is susceptible to infrasonic waves like this. It doesn't explain why one skier was missing a tongue and another was missing eyes. It doesn't explain why they had internal crushing injuries and broken bones but no bruises or any external injuries. It doesn't explain why a few bodies had dark orange skin and were highly radioactive. It doesn't explain why no one before or since, of the thousands of people who have been there, have ever experienced this phenomenon, including the natives who live in the area, and multiple teams of researchers who investigated the deaths.
It doesn't take into account the lights they saw in the sky (which were later identified as Russian missile launches, as the mountain is near a top secret military base) and any possible motive the military would have for killing them to keep their missile tests a secret.
No reason is given why the author did not go to the mountain and set up any equipment to listen for these infrasonic waves. He's throwing away all other hypotheses as obviously wrong and setting up his own as obviously right without actually conducting a test to see if these waves are actually produced by the mountain or not? He didn't actually conduct the test? He based it on similarly shaped mountains that produce kind of similar infrasonic effects that have never ever killed anyone so far.
I shit you not.
There, I just saved you the $20 for the book and ruined the author's fun by exposing the secret ending.
Now, here's what we do know:
•FACT: This was during the coldest time in the Cold War when both the US and USSR were testing a great deal of new weapons.
•FACT: There is a Soviet military base within the vicinity of the mountains where the hikers were staying.
•FACT: There were reports of lights in the sky were confirmed to have been Soviet rocket tests.
•FACT: The Soviet Union has a long history of testing air-burst weapons such as the Father of All Bombs.
•FACT: The internal crushing injuries the skiers received are consistent with the powerful shock waves produced by these types of explosives.
•FACT: The Soviet government had every reason in the world to cover up the deaths as they had with other accidental casualties of military experiments, such as the anthrax leak at Sverdlovsk in 1979.
Can this hypothesis I've cobbled together over the past ten minutes explain everything about the Dyatlov Pass incident? No. Does it do a better job at explaining at least some of the details than the total bullshit explanation a Hollywood screenwriter came up with and repackaged as non-fiction because he wanted to get a movie deal and drum up positive press for his potential future pay day? Absolutely.
By the way, I've used first-person pronouns with less frequency in this review than the author did in the original book.
Sunday, June 12, 2016
The Origin and Solution to Violence
I am convinced that the vast majority of violence in the world is caused by bad parenting. Yes, a very small minority of people are naturally evil, but we can put systems in place to deal with them effectively. Most people, however, are evil because how they were raised. No one saw the warning signs at an early stage and dealt with them. And the reason for that is because well over 99% of all parents have no clue what they're doing. They never learned to develop the proper faculties, so they fall back on the same devious tricks their parents used to raise them, and the great circle of crap makes another turn.
What is violence? Violence isn't just hitting. In fact, violence mostly has no physical component at all. Most violence is psychological. Lying, bribing, using guilt or shame or envy to manipulate, hypocrisy, threatening, all forms of deception and mind games are forms of violence.
Why do people lie? Because their parents lied to them so they think lying is acceptable. People see all the horrible things their parents do to them as children, and it forms a mental program. If parents can do it to children, which should be the closest bond, and that's okay, then there should be no problem doing it to a stranger. It is a self-perpetuating system.
Children are a parent's number one priority. Children are a parent's number two priority. Children are a parent's number one hundred priority. Everything else is dust in the wind. You made the mess, you opened the door and brought someone into this world - without consent - who will suffer, grow old, and die. You did that, now it is your responsibility to fix it. You created this disaster of human suffering, now it is your responsibility to alleviate it.
Similarly, the solution to violence in the world is good parenting. That too is a self-perpetuating system. The more good parents there are the more children will grow up to become good parents, and then the system will flip and violence will diminish.
There is no other solution.
What is violence? Violence isn't just hitting. In fact, violence mostly has no physical component at all. Most violence is psychological. Lying, bribing, using guilt or shame or envy to manipulate, hypocrisy, threatening, all forms of deception and mind games are forms of violence.
Why do people lie? Because their parents lied to them so they think lying is acceptable. People see all the horrible things their parents do to them as children, and it forms a mental program. If parents can do it to children, which should be the closest bond, and that's okay, then there should be no problem doing it to a stranger. It is a self-perpetuating system.
Children are a parent's number one priority. Children are a parent's number two priority. Children are a parent's number one hundred priority. Everything else is dust in the wind. You made the mess, you opened the door and brought someone into this world - without consent - who will suffer, grow old, and die. You did that, now it is your responsibility to fix it. You created this disaster of human suffering, now it is your responsibility to alleviate it.
Similarly, the solution to violence in the world is good parenting. That too is a self-perpetuating system. The more good parents there are the more children will grow up to become good parents, and then the system will flip and violence will diminish.
There is no other solution.
Saturday, September 5, 2015
Get Out and Play
I was outside on this day with absolutely perfect weather and got to thinking about kids playing outside. From there it was an easy step to adults playing outside, and why they don't.
Adults don't play, they *exercise*. It's not fun, it's torturous and hard and adults complain all the way through, they complain before, they complain after. If *exercise* is so damn horrible why don't adults stop exercising and start playing again? It could take the same amount of time, you'll still secretly be getting exercise, only you'll be having a lot more fun, and joy makes the body's secretion levels normal.
Why do adults *exercise*? It's to impress people they hate. Adults want to look better than the people they hate so they exercise. Anyone who thinks it's to impress potential mates is a fool. Look around and see, ugly people mate more than attractive people, because ugly people learn kindness and at the end of the day people would much rather be treated with kindness by an ugly person than treated with scorn by an attractive person. Attractive people will hate you no matter how good you look, so stop trying. They've had it easy, getting through life on their looks, they don't give a shit about treating people right. You're wasting your time trying to look good to impress people. In the end it doesn't matter if you have pecs on your abs or if your clothing size is somehow a negative number. You'll still get old, you'll still die. So what if you live an extra five years if they're spent in misery? I'm not saying don't take care of your body, don't turn it into a sewer, just remember when you were a kid and you played instead of *exercised* your body pretty much took care of itself.
From there my mind went to the disgusting trend of hairless humans. They look like hairless mice. It started just with women shaving their legs because of a propaganda campaign by the razor companies 100 years ago, and then it moved to men and women being totally hairless from the neck down. It's disgusting. Hairlessness has always been a sign of disease, however in the world did people come to be brainwashed to believe it's attractive? I'm pretty sure if humans were supposed to be hairless they would be.
Adults don't play, they *exercise*. It's not fun, it's torturous and hard and adults complain all the way through, they complain before, they complain after. If *exercise* is so damn horrible why don't adults stop exercising and start playing again? It could take the same amount of time, you'll still secretly be getting exercise, only you'll be having a lot more fun, and joy makes the body's secretion levels normal.
Why do adults *exercise*? It's to impress people they hate. Adults want to look better than the people they hate so they exercise. Anyone who thinks it's to impress potential mates is a fool. Look around and see, ugly people mate more than attractive people, because ugly people learn kindness and at the end of the day people would much rather be treated with kindness by an ugly person than treated with scorn by an attractive person. Attractive people will hate you no matter how good you look, so stop trying. They've had it easy, getting through life on their looks, they don't give a shit about treating people right. You're wasting your time trying to look good to impress people. In the end it doesn't matter if you have pecs on your abs or if your clothing size is somehow a negative number. You'll still get old, you'll still die. So what if you live an extra five years if they're spent in misery? I'm not saying don't take care of your body, don't turn it into a sewer, just remember when you were a kid and you played instead of *exercised* your body pretty much took care of itself.
From there my mind went to the disgusting trend of hairless humans. They look like hairless mice. It started just with women shaving their legs because of a propaganda campaign by the razor companies 100 years ago, and then it moved to men and women being totally hairless from the neck down. It's disgusting. Hairlessness has always been a sign of disease, however in the world did people come to be brainwashed to believe it's attractive? I'm pretty sure if humans were supposed to be hairless they would be.
Tuesday, February 17, 2015
Friday, January 9, 2015
Saturday, October 25, 2014
The First Swallow
Here is a 1942 cartoon about the swallows of Capistrano. It has nothing to do with mysticism, or politics, or economics, or philosophy, or parapsychology. It's just a lovely little cartoon that reminds us there is still good in the world. Enjoy!
Wednesday, October 8, 2014
The Not-So Lovely Bones
So I read this book today, "The Lovely Bones" by Alice Sebold. I had wanted to read this for several years and I finally found a copy for sale in the library. You think, a girl gets murdered and tries to communicate to her family about who did it. What could be more exciting than that?
Let me spare you 330 pages.
It sucked.
I could use this book in a writing class on how not to write well, and also as an example of how total crap can still manage to sell millions of copies.
There is a shopping list of characters I had trouble keeping track of, they were so plain and unappealing. I didn't care about a single one of them, except the villain, who I wanted to finally be brought to justice, but he wasn't. The few characters who I do remember I could probably summarise in a couple of words.
You have the mother, who is a selfish disgrace, who has an affair with the keystone cop who has never solved a murder case in his entire career (as evident from the stack of pictures he keeps in his wallet of all the victims he never found), while her husband is in the hospital after being savagely beaten by a thug who he accidentally ran across trying to get laid in a corn field. She then runs off without telling anyone to California for a decade because she just wanted sex, not kids. When she comes back under unbelievable circumstances (her husband has a heart attack and all of a sudden she cares enough to go back home) it's only the teenage son, who she left as a toddler, who has the guts to tell her to fuck off for being a horrible monster of a person, but in the end all is forgive and forget.
The father who, I don't even know what he does, it's mentioned he worked once, but let's assume he's on the welfare because in every scene he is in his study writing down theories of his daughter's death and brooding. He's the butt monkey of the story who gets beaten up, cheated on, and nearly dies.
The sister who is in permanent bitchy mode for several chapters until she becomes the bland, featureless girlfirend of some guy who is equally featureless who drives a motorcycle. He's some kind of a carpenter I think.
He's presented as kind of a bad boy greaser, but he's about as exciting as tepid bath water. They have sex at summer camp, I think.
The brother who tries really hard to be the one normal character in the whole book, but he becomes cold and distant later on after putting up with the collective shit of all the other characters.
The alcoholic grandmother who's been around the block more than a few times acts kind of as a comedy relief character. She also serves as a foil to the mother for a couple of chapters before she runs away to California.
The Indian woman neighbor wants a divorce because she's not living a story book romance.
Her son, the dead girl's boyfriend. He's supposed to be like the most smoking hot guy who ever lived because he's the one brown person in a town of white people. He's that guy all the girls go crazy for and you can never figure out why he's getting laid every night while you and your friends can't get any. Aside from the fact that he's the ONE foreign boy in town I can't figure out why he's so damn attractive. He has sex with the dead girl when she possesses the body of the feminazi in the second to last chapter. I shit you not. They're a half mile from the murder scene, the dead girl possesses the body of this girl who's driving with the Indian guy, and she has a couple hours with him to tell him "hey, my body is buried right there, behind those trees. You can solve the murder that's been open for a decade right now, just go there and dig. There's fifteen pages left in the book, you can bring colsure to the entire story, just dig up the fucking body." Nope. She says "come with me in the shower and let's fuck" and even though she's possessing the body of the feminazi the Indian guy doesn't find it at all odd and they fuck right there.
There's the keystone cop, who's specialty is not solving crimes, it's seducing other men's wives. He's apparently done it a lot of time, since the book says he has a special room where he goes to have affairs with more women than you will ever date in your entire life.
There's the feminazi who turned total batshit crazy after the girl died. She started smoking pot and drawing the women from Playboy. She writes poetry and sees crimes against women everywhere she goes. Literally. She hallucinates rapes and murders everywhere.
She'll go get coffee and see an apparition behind the counter of a dead woman. Or she'll see a murder taking place on a rooftop across the street. She obsesses over solving the dead girl's murder, but when she finally gets the idea to go to where the body is hidden, and she sees the dead girl's ghost, she doesn't say anything to the Indian boy, she writes it down and then pretends like nothing happened. She passes out for no evident reason and spends a few hours in the most boring Heaven imaginable reading poems to dead beatniks while the dead girl is having sex with her body.
There's the villain who is like the god of all pedophiles.
He's killed at least 20 people but he's so non-threatening, he's so pathetic, that nobody ever suspects him. Except the father, and the sister, but they're dismissed as crazy because the god of pedophiles can't be guilty because all the police in this world are totally incompetent. He has a diagram of the murder scene and the thinnest of tissue paper alibis, and the keystone cops believe him! After ten years everyone forgets about him and the dead girl. The dead girl, hovering over him while he's outside having a smoke, startles him with a falling icicle, he has a heart attack, and dies. On the second to last fucking page. That's how it ends. She literally could have killed him at any time in the entire story, but she waits until the second to last page because I guess the author saw the book was going to end and needed an actual ending or a lot of people would be pissed off. She would have been happy just to let him get away scott free.
Then there's the dead girl herself, who narrates this book. And she talks non-the-fuck-stop about the most boring, tangential crap nobody cares about. This book could have easily been 120 pages, but it just kept going about train rides and tomato plants, and boring every day shit like those old books the so called "great" authors wrote back in the day when they were paid by the word so they wrote these absolutely huge monstrosities that could bore you to sleep. At LEAST half the book is useless tangents that don't advance the story at all.
And you have the absolute most boring depiction of Heaven ever in all of literature. Every day the dead girl sits in a gazebo and watches the people on Earth, and every night all the dead people gather together and have a rock concert or something. It wouldn't even be a week before I got bored of that, let alone eternity.
I'm glad I only paid a dollar for it. This is definitely one to skip.
40/100
Let me spare you 330 pages.
It sucked.
I could use this book in a writing class on how not to write well, and also as an example of how total crap can still manage to sell millions of copies.
There is a shopping list of characters I had trouble keeping track of, they were so plain and unappealing. I didn't care about a single one of them, except the villain, who I wanted to finally be brought to justice, but he wasn't. The few characters who I do remember I could probably summarise in a couple of words.
You have the mother, who is a selfish disgrace, who has an affair with the keystone cop who has never solved a murder case in his entire career (as evident from the stack of pictures he keeps in his wallet of all the victims he never found), while her husband is in the hospital after being savagely beaten by a thug who he accidentally ran across trying to get laid in a corn field. She then runs off without telling anyone to California for a decade because she just wanted sex, not kids. When she comes back under unbelievable circumstances (her husband has a heart attack and all of a sudden she cares enough to go back home) it's only the teenage son, who she left as a toddler, who has the guts to tell her to fuck off for being a horrible monster of a person, but in the end all is forgive and forget.
The father who, I don't even know what he does, it's mentioned he worked once, but let's assume he's on the welfare because in every scene he is in his study writing down theories of his daughter's death and brooding. He's the butt monkey of the story who gets beaten up, cheated on, and nearly dies.
The sister who is in permanent bitchy mode for several chapters until she becomes the bland, featureless girlfirend of some guy who is equally featureless who drives a motorcycle. He's some kind of a carpenter I think.
He's presented as kind of a bad boy greaser, but he's about as exciting as tepid bath water. They have sex at summer camp, I think.
The brother who tries really hard to be the one normal character in the whole book, but he becomes cold and distant later on after putting up with the collective shit of all the other characters.
The alcoholic grandmother who's been around the block more than a few times acts kind of as a comedy relief character. She also serves as a foil to the mother for a couple of chapters before she runs away to California.
The Indian woman neighbor wants a divorce because she's not living a story book romance.
Her son, the dead girl's boyfriend. He's supposed to be like the most smoking hot guy who ever lived because he's the one brown person in a town of white people. He's that guy all the girls go crazy for and you can never figure out why he's getting laid every night while you and your friends can't get any. Aside from the fact that he's the ONE foreign boy in town I can't figure out why he's so damn attractive. He has sex with the dead girl when she possesses the body of the feminazi in the second to last chapter. I shit you not. They're a half mile from the murder scene, the dead girl possesses the body of this girl who's driving with the Indian guy, and she has a couple hours with him to tell him "hey, my body is buried right there, behind those trees. You can solve the murder that's been open for a decade right now, just go there and dig. There's fifteen pages left in the book, you can bring colsure to the entire story, just dig up the fucking body." Nope. She says "come with me in the shower and let's fuck" and even though she's possessing the body of the feminazi the Indian guy doesn't find it at all odd and they fuck right there.
There's the keystone cop, who's specialty is not solving crimes, it's seducing other men's wives. He's apparently done it a lot of time, since the book says he has a special room where he goes to have affairs with more women than you will ever date in your entire life.
There's the feminazi who turned total batshit crazy after the girl died. She started smoking pot and drawing the women from Playboy. She writes poetry and sees crimes against women everywhere she goes. Literally. She hallucinates rapes and murders everywhere.
She'll go get coffee and see an apparition behind the counter of a dead woman. Or she'll see a murder taking place on a rooftop across the street. She obsesses over solving the dead girl's murder, but when she finally gets the idea to go to where the body is hidden, and she sees the dead girl's ghost, she doesn't say anything to the Indian boy, she writes it down and then pretends like nothing happened. She passes out for no evident reason and spends a few hours in the most boring Heaven imaginable reading poems to dead beatniks while the dead girl is having sex with her body.
There's the villain who is like the god of all pedophiles.
He's killed at least 20 people but he's so non-threatening, he's so pathetic, that nobody ever suspects him. Except the father, and the sister, but they're dismissed as crazy because the god of pedophiles can't be guilty because all the police in this world are totally incompetent. He has a diagram of the murder scene and the thinnest of tissue paper alibis, and the keystone cops believe him! After ten years everyone forgets about him and the dead girl. The dead girl, hovering over him while he's outside having a smoke, startles him with a falling icicle, he has a heart attack, and dies. On the second to last fucking page. That's how it ends. She literally could have killed him at any time in the entire story, but she waits until the second to last page because I guess the author saw the book was going to end and needed an actual ending or a lot of people would be pissed off. She would have been happy just to let him get away scott free.
Then there's the dead girl herself, who narrates this book. And she talks non-the-fuck-stop about the most boring, tangential crap nobody cares about. This book could have easily been 120 pages, but it just kept going about train rides and tomato plants, and boring every day shit like those old books the so called "great" authors wrote back in the day when they were paid by the word so they wrote these absolutely huge monstrosities that could bore you to sleep. At LEAST half the book is useless tangents that don't advance the story at all.
And you have the absolute most boring depiction of Heaven ever in all of literature. Every day the dead girl sits in a gazebo and watches the people on Earth, and every night all the dead people gather together and have a rock concert or something. It wouldn't even be a week before I got bored of that, let alone eternity.
I'm glad I only paid a dollar for it. This is definitely one to skip.
40/100
Tuesday, September 30, 2014
Donate not Dump
Rob Greenfield, a political activist of some kind, travels across America eating out of trash cans to demonstrate how enough food is thrown away every year to feed all our hungry. This is something I've been saying for years. It's a disgrace that so much food is wasted.
Monday, June 9, 2014
2114
What will the world look like 100 years from now? Taking clues from the past century can provide us with a simple yet fairly accurate assessment of the next century.
A short video that makes an astute observation regarding basic human nature in a fun way.
A short video that makes an astute observation regarding basic human nature in a fun way.
Monday, March 17, 2014
A Big Steaming Pile
It's the most absurd thing ever,
picking up after your dog. It's sick. I'm going to go walking down
the street with a bag of shit waving back and forth, back and forth,
stinking and bouncing against my thigh. It's disgusting. I want five
minutes alone with whoever came up with that law. Why not just leave
it in the street, where it will biodegrade in a couple days. That
plastic bag, that's covered in shit, that can't be used for anything
else, will last a million years. That bullshit law has just turned a
week long problem into a problem that will far beyond the point where
all our bones have turned to dust.
I can understand not
letting the dog go on someone's lawn. This one prick, her dog pissed
on my lawn while she was talking to me. She should thank God I wasn't
armed at that moment or it would have been the last mistake she ever
made. I don't want to mow my lawn and find a turd, I can understand
that, but the street? What's the harm leaving it in the
street?
Birds can shit wherever they want, and with those damn
geese it's WORSE than human turds. They are a biological hazard and
totally destroy whatever environment they invade. Squirrels can shit
wherever they want, deer, bears, every animal can shit wherever it
wants, but not dogs. What the fuck? What makes dog shit,
specifically, so hazardous while geese shit is perfectly sanitary and
nobody need pick it up? Whoever invented this law, I want to chop off
his balls and choke him to death with them.
"Wastewater treatment system is
NOT designed to filter dog waste!"
But it filters bird waste
no problem? What's the difference? It filters EVERY kind of animal
waste EXCEPT dogs? That's bullshit right there.
"Our
natural ecosystem can handle 2 dogs per square mile."
Then
where the fuck did dogs come from? I'm pretty sure there was a time
when there were more than 2 wild dogs alive in the same square mile
eating and mating, otherwise there wouldn't be any dogs around
today.
"According to the EPA dog poop is as toxic to the
environment as chemical and oil spills."
Bullshit. Don't be
fucking stupid. A chemical spill in India killed thousands of people
overnight. Never once has thousands of people died from a fucking dog
turd.
WHY THE FUCK IS GEESE SHIT PERFECTLY SAFE BUT DOG SHIT
IS THE WORST TOXIC HAZARD EVER?
What more, people BUY shit - they call
it "Menwar" to make it sound fancy - to spread on their
lawns to make it grow, but that's not DOG shit, that's special French
shit that's so expensive it has to be clean and beautiful! All those
chemical fertilizers and pesticides, no problem at all. That's
certainly not going into the water supply. But a turd! A fucking
turd! That's the worst thing evar!
Give me a fucking break.
Sunday, January 19, 2014
Actors Are Paid Too Much
When actors are paid more than fire fighters our priorities are ass backwards.
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Moron Young People
I
forgot, people fifty years ago were so "backward" and "repressive" and
"uneducated." That's why there were a thousand times as many engineers
in this country as there are today. That's why we went to the Moon 12
times with computers less powerful than the average wrist watch is
today. That's why we built the Panama Canal. Yep. People sure were
"backward" and "uneducated" back then. That's why an
1850s eighth grade proficiency exam is so difficult that college
graduates can't pass it today. That's why the average IQ in America is
expected to drop to just two points above mental retardation over the
next twenty years, why the average highschool graduate can't make change
or read at a fourth grade level and doesn't know how many states there
are or who the vice president is. But they are the "good enlightened
sexually liberated" progressives who know better than us, when they've
never done a single thing in their entire lives and never will because
they're a disease. They are leaches on society.
It would be
funny if people laughed at these morons and mocked them, because they
deserve to be mocked. They deserve to be mocked back to the basements
they crawled out from so we can take society back and take academia back
and start getting more native math and science degrees instead of
having to import all our smart people from overseas. It's true. The
school system is so badly broken that there aren't enough smart people
in America anymore so we have to import them from other countries.
Without the intellectual visas that are handed out by the hundreds every
year this country would have collapsed already. It's foreigners who are
keeping this country going, whether they invent our new technologies or
buy our debt or pick fruit in our orchards. If it wasn't for foreigners
this country would be gone already.
It's disgusting. It was
once fashionable to be smart in America. People used to hang out in
taverns and debate things, now they just want to get high and have sex.
The life of the average young person is totally consumed with personal
pleasure, and it's disgusting. They don't want to become professionals.
They don't want to be surgeons or engineers and build the new
telecommunications network or fix our electrical grid that's badly out
of date and is seriously vulnerable to systemic collapse. They don't
want to build safe thorium nuclear reactors to get us off of fossil
fuels, or figure out how to reclaim waste so we can reuse it without
making a mess. All they want is to play on their iphones and have sex,
that's it. It makes me want to vomit.
forgot, people fifty years ago were so "backward" and "repressive" and
"uneducated." That's why there were a thousand times as many engineers
in this country as there are today. That's why we went to the Moon 12
times with computers less powerful than the average wrist watch is
today. That's why we built the Panama Canal. Yep. People sure were
"backward" and "uneducated" back then. That's why an
1850s eighth grade proficiency exam is so difficult that college
graduates can't pass it today. That's why the average IQ in America is
expected to drop to just two points above mental retardation over the
next twenty years, why the average highschool graduate can't make change
or read at a fourth grade level and doesn't know how many states there
are or who the vice president is. But they are the "good enlightened
sexually liberated" progressives who know better than us, when they've
never done a single thing in their entire lives and never will because
they're a disease. They are leaches on society.
It would be
funny if people laughed at these morons and mocked them, because they
deserve to be mocked. They deserve to be mocked back to the basements
they crawled out from so we can take society back and take academia back
and start getting more native math and science degrees instead of
having to import all our smart people from overseas. It's true. The
school system is so badly broken that there aren't enough smart people
in America anymore so we have to import them from other countries.
Without the intellectual visas that are handed out by the hundreds every
year this country would have collapsed already. It's foreigners who are
keeping this country going, whether they invent our new technologies or
buy our debt or pick fruit in our orchards. If it wasn't for foreigners
this country would be gone already.
It's disgusting. It was
once fashionable to be smart in America. People used to hang out in
taverns and debate things, now they just want to get high and have sex.
The life of the average young person is totally consumed with personal
pleasure, and it's disgusting. They don't want to become professionals.
They don't want to be surgeons or engineers and build the new
telecommunications network or fix our electrical grid that's badly out
of date and is seriously vulnerable to systemic collapse. They don't
want to build safe thorium nuclear reactors to get us off of fossil
fuels, or figure out how to reclaim waste so we can reuse it without
making a mess. All they want is to play on their iphones and have sex,
that's it. It makes me want to vomit.
Sunday, December 30, 2012
Scrying
For those few who may remember, the title and topic of my first ever post on The Urban Mystic, in February 2006, was on scrying, a term used to describe a variety of divination methods involving staring at reflective surfaces. Today, I experimented again, gazing into a mirror which reflected a featureless white surface in a dimly lit room. I gazed until no more light remained (about thirty minutes), at which time an image did begin to appear, but it vanished very quickly, and with it all visible light, ending the experiment. I liked the results, and will, in the future, continue this practice. As always, I will keep you updated.
Friday, May 18, 2012
Ron Paul Versus The New World Order
Dayum!
Old guy owns a whole room of bigger, younger guys. The one guy he hits in the face and he goes down and stays down the whole video like he's dead or something. There is no way to confirm whether it is or is not Ron Paul, but it looks like him and a couple of people in the comments section says that is what he would do to the NWO so just pretend it is and be amazed.
Old guy owns a whole room of bigger, younger guys. The one guy he hits in the face and he goes down and stays down the whole video like he's dead or something. There is no way to confirm whether it is or is not Ron Paul, but it looks like him and a couple of people in the comments section says that is what he would do to the NWO so just pretend it is and be amazed.
Saturday, May 5, 2012
Ethan Frome In A Nutshell
Some complete moron, maybe mentally challenged, named Ethan Frome lives in a cabin he built with his bare hands with his wife who is very ugly. They eat pickles and doughnuts for every meal and nothing else yet they haven't died of malnutrition yet. They live in some place that snows all the time and is miles from the nearest human settlement. Some bloke visits the nearest town and asks about Ethan and they tell him nothing so he ambushes the guy and they get trapped in a cabin or something and Ethan reminisces about his crappy boring life. His wife is Xena Warrior Princess but she's played by someone other than Lucy Lawless because, like I said before, she's ugly and Lucy is not. Anyway, his sister or someone comes along for some reason (hell if I know) and he totally has the hots for her and they do it but it was left out of the book! The only good part was missing and it pisses me off. Nothing happens. Nothing happens. I think they're looking for some witch or something, I wasn't paying attention. Ethan and his sister try to steal away into the night because they're like the Scarlet Letter or something, and his sister goes nuts because society won't let them be together. They make a suicide pact and go on a sled ride to wack a tree and drop dead but they survive. Ethan is now a cripple or something and the hell if I know what happened to the chick society wouldn't let him score with. His wife is now an anchor around his neck because he's a cripple and she was useless from day one, but now he has to take care of her and his crippleness and he can't do it alone and we're supposed to cry like little girls or something because of that. The end.
Thursday, March 29, 2012
If I Were The Devil
Famous broadcaster Paul Harvey tells us what he would do to America if he were the Devil. When I first heard this it frightened me. Every single thing has already happened. Paul Harvey's Devil has already corrupted the country. Listen to a warning from history. (runs 3 minutes)
And now you know the rest of the story.
And now you know the rest of the story.
Friday, March 9, 2012
Kony 2012 EXPOSED
The famous video behind the "Kony 2012" campaign from Invisible Children has risen to meteoric heights in the past few days. It's the one where they ask people to give them money to take down a Ugandan warlord, Joseph Kony, who hasn't been in Uganda since 2006. They're asking mindless kids to take action on weed day like the Occupy people and the Arab Spring that ruined the lives of the Egyptians.
The video wants us to put pressure on US military in Uganda to eliminate a guy who is not even in the country, so the Ugandans can't do anything about him? Why are we doing this again?
Follow the money.
Invisible Children spends only one third of its revenue on doing anything in Africa. They make almost $14 million a year and a good deal of what they spend it on is sending rich white kids to Africa. Here is a video presenting a counterpoint to Kony 2012. It is by a Ugandan girl who gives us the word on the street of how life in Uganda is nothing like the picture painted in Kony 2012 (runs 6 minutes):
The video wants us to put pressure on US military in Uganda to eliminate a guy who is not even in the country, so the Ugandans can't do anything about him? Why are we doing this again?
Follow the money.
Invisible Children spends only one third of its revenue on doing anything in Africa. They make almost $14 million a year and a good deal of what they spend it on is sending rich white kids to Africa. Here is a video presenting a counterpoint to Kony 2012. It is by a Ugandan girl who gives us the word on the street of how life in Uganda is nothing like the picture painted in Kony 2012 (runs 6 minutes):
Monday, February 27, 2012
Luck, Luck, Luck!*
Dilbert 14 January 1998
I was thinking the other day about luck. It's always been that I've never believed in luck, but now it seems like there are really is something to it. What got me thinking was the unlikelihood of the other options. Put simply, every event in the universe can be a result of:
1. The micromanagement of a Grand Organizing Designer
2. Completely random
3. Willed action
4. Deterministic processes
5. Some combination of the above
Is that really all there is to it? Do we make our own luck or is it all just shit happening? How many of the above possibilities actually exist? The answers to those questions depend on who you ask.
Epiphionominalists and a lot of the "new atheists" like Will Provine (the refreshingly honest one) will reject #3 outright. There is no mind so there is no will. Neither is there God, so shit happens that can either be determined or cannot. Other, theistic determinists will reject #3, and, depending on their degree of hardness, #2 and #4 as well. They assert that God pulls all the strings, guiding everything from which atom slams into which atom to who steps out into traffic at the wrong time and gets wacked by a bus.
Some things don't seem explainable by any of the above in a convincing way. It may be necessary to add a few possibilities to the list, such as 6. Psychic functions, and 7. Luck. Here are two examples from personal experience that may necessitate these additions.
Today at roughly 5:50PM I began thinking about vending machines for no obvious reason. Vending machines of all types and in particular machines that dispense sandwiches and beer. After getting started cooking I turned on the television. The History Channel was on and it was Modern Marvels, and it was the episode on vending machines and other coin operated devices. Some scofftics will say "coincidence!1" Okay, well, how much of a coincidence is it when such a thing recurrs regularly? When I watched the reruns of King of the Hill I frequently knew which episode would air before turning on the television. Throughout the day I would think of jokes from a particular episode, and most of the time that happened I was right about which episode would air later in the night. Scofftics will shout even louder "Coincidence!!!!!1" When asked, well how many times does it need to happen before you'll consider it's not a coincidence? The scofftics will shout even louderer "EVERYTHING IS COINCIDENCE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111111111"
Fuck them.
Precog experiments have demonstrated the actual existence of psychic functions like this. It doesn't matter if someone shouts loudly that the sky is pink and green stripes, that doesn't change the fact that it's blue, just like no matter how much the skep-dicks lie that doesn't change reality to suit their wants.
Then there's luck, which I not think is akin to Sheldrake's morphic fields. Why do some people have good luck and some people have rotten luck? What is luck and how do you explain it? Well, Rupert Sheldrake made famous the concept of fields of information that affect how the universe works. An example of a morphic field might be a type of crystal formation. Say that the odds of a certain type of crystal forming is really low. Well, one crystal beats the odds and forms, and that act of forming leaves an imprint on the fabric of the universe that changes the odds. Now, since that one crystal formed it is slightly more likely that a similar crystal will form. This happens a couple hundred times and now the odds of similar crystals forming are much better because the morphic field has built up by all the previous generations of crystals.
Luck might work the same way. The more good luck someone has the more it is reinforcing the good luck morphic field built up by that person and the better luck they get. The same works in reverse. This is why it may be very difficult in deed to change your luck if you've built it up very strongly over time in either direction, good or bad. Changing your luck would require changing the field which may be accessed at a subconscious level. Doing this may involve "reprogramming" your subconscious thought processes, which is notoriously difficult to do consciously.
Of course this is all just specualtion at this point. Someone would need to develop an experiment to test lucky and unlucky people and see how luck changes over time. Until then we'll just have to hold off judgment.
*Said like a chicken.
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Why "The Walking Dead" Can't Happen
UPDATE: Everyone's infected! Problem solved. (18 March 2012)
Let's get it out first that this will be dealing only with the television series, not the comic book. The comic book nicely avoids this problem all together by having everyone who dies for any reason except brain injury reanimate.
Aside from the first half of season two being about two episodes stretched out to seven and not getting anywhere for no apparent reason (money?), and the improbable aiming skills the characters have (try making a head-shot every single time while both you and your target are moving top speed - bet you can't!)*, and the glaring inconsistencies with how the zombies work**, the whole business of zombification would render the story completely impossible from the start.
In the TV series "The Walking Dead" the only way someone becomes a zombie is to be bitten by a zombie, escape, die, and then reanimate. It doesn't help to be bitten and then devoured because there's nothing left to reanimate. You have to kill the zombie (kill, they're already dead!) or run away, and then go croak somewhere because a zombie bite is always fatal. Then when you die you have to be far enough away from the zombies to not have your body eaten, because reanimation isn't instantaneous. Dr. Jenner stated that it takes a few minutes to a few hours before the brainstem starts up again, so if you're eaten within that window you won't zombify.
Anyone who dies but is not bitten will not zombify, as the mess of bodies in the traffic pile up attest to. This leads one to wonder if the process of zombification takes so long and requires a bite from a creature that certainly won't say "he's dead, I'll attack a living now and leave his body to zombify," you're going to have a hard time reaching plague proportions. Consider next the fighting abilities of humans and zombies. Zombie to human kills are at least eight to one. Anyone with a gun will kill as many zombies as they have bullets, guaranteed. Unless a minimum of eight zombies attacks any person, no matter how big or strong or fast or smart or well armed, that person will survive. When we combine these two problems there is absolutely no way we can have a global zombie pandemic with only a handful of humans left. The mathematics just doesn't work. If zombies are so damn difficult to make and so damn easy to kill there is absolutely no way to get a zombie apocalypse going. Maybe a couple towns will be caught off guard, but not an entire country, and certainly not the whole planet.
Don't say that maybe one zombie bit ten or twenty people before being put down. They don't do that. A zombie will keep attacking someone until they eat the person or are destroyed. They are not smart enough to sacrifice themselves by biting several people to spread the plague before being killed. Zombiism doesn't spread fast enough for a zombie to bite someone, have them turn, and then move on to someone new. Unless we eliminate one or both of the above facts - the dificulty of zombification or the kill disparity - there is no way "The Walking Dead" can happen. That's what you get when you try to have dead zombies who spread like living zombies.
*Andrea is the only one that has ever missed, and only because missing was relevant to advance the story, and she still very nearly killed Daryl (with a head shot, as if I needed to mention it) at 200+ yards, from an unsupported prone position, facing the sun, with an unknown number of head winds, with five friendlies just feet away from Daryl, on the second time she's ever fired a gun. Damn! Now that's beginner's luck! Her stupidity could easily have killed one or more of six people. Even if there was a zombie there's no way a thinking person would have attempted a shot like that.
**Sometimes they hunt by smell, other times they don't; sometimes loud sounds like gunfire will attract them, other times you can teach people how to shoot all afternoon and attract no attention at all; whatever reanimates them only restartes the brainstem but people can hit them anywhere in the head and still bring them down, going so far as to have Daryl shoot one with his crossbow up through the jaw and hard palate into the nasal cavity and kill it after it started gnawing on his boot even though the bolt would have only gone through the frontal lobes, which were explicitly stated to not restart with zombification.
Let's get it out first that this will be dealing only with the television series, not the comic book. The comic book nicely avoids this problem all together by having everyone who dies for any reason except brain injury reanimate.
Aside from the first half of season two being about two episodes stretched out to seven and not getting anywhere for no apparent reason (money?), and the improbable aiming skills the characters have (try making a head-shot every single time while both you and your target are moving top speed - bet you can't!)*, and the glaring inconsistencies with how the zombies work**, the whole business of zombification would render the story completely impossible from the start.
In the TV series "The Walking Dead" the only way someone becomes a zombie is to be bitten by a zombie, escape, die, and then reanimate. It doesn't help to be bitten and then devoured because there's nothing left to reanimate. You have to kill the zombie (kill, they're already dead!) or run away, and then go croak somewhere because a zombie bite is always fatal. Then when you die you have to be far enough away from the zombies to not have your body eaten, because reanimation isn't instantaneous. Dr. Jenner stated that it takes a few minutes to a few hours before the brainstem starts up again, so if you're eaten within that window you won't zombify.
Anyone who dies but is not bitten will not zombify, as the mess of bodies in the traffic pile up attest to. This leads one to wonder if the process of zombification takes so long and requires a bite from a creature that certainly won't say "he's dead, I'll attack a living now and leave his body to zombify," you're going to have a hard time reaching plague proportions. Consider next the fighting abilities of humans and zombies. Zombie to human kills are at least eight to one. Anyone with a gun will kill as many zombies as they have bullets, guaranteed. Unless a minimum of eight zombies attacks any person, no matter how big or strong or fast or smart or well armed, that person will survive. When we combine these two problems there is absolutely no way we can have a global zombie pandemic with only a handful of humans left. The mathematics just doesn't work. If zombies are so damn difficult to make and so damn easy to kill there is absolutely no way to get a zombie apocalypse going. Maybe a couple towns will be caught off guard, but not an entire country, and certainly not the whole planet.
Don't say that maybe one zombie bit ten or twenty people before being put down. They don't do that. A zombie will keep attacking someone until they eat the person or are destroyed. They are not smart enough to sacrifice themselves by biting several people to spread the plague before being killed. Zombiism doesn't spread fast enough for a zombie to bite someone, have them turn, and then move on to someone new. Unless we eliminate one or both of the above facts - the dificulty of zombification or the kill disparity - there is no way "The Walking Dead" can happen. That's what you get when you try to have dead zombies who spread like living zombies.
*Andrea is the only one that has ever missed, and only because missing was relevant to advance the story, and she still very nearly killed Daryl (with a head shot, as if I needed to mention it) at 200+ yards, from an unsupported prone position, facing the sun, with an unknown number of head winds, with five friendlies just feet away from Daryl, on the second time she's ever fired a gun. Damn! Now that's beginner's luck! Her stupidity could easily have killed one or more of six people. Even if there was a zombie there's no way a thinking person would have attempted a shot like that.
**Sometimes they hunt by smell, other times they don't; sometimes loud sounds like gunfire will attract them, other times you can teach people how to shoot all afternoon and attract no attention at all; whatever reanimates them only restartes the brainstem but people can hit them anywhere in the head and still bring them down, going so far as to have Daryl shoot one with his crossbow up through the jaw and hard palate into the nasal cavity and kill it after it started gnawing on his boot even though the bolt would have only gone through the frontal lobes, which were explicitly stated to not restart with zombification.
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