Early success

Ok so when I first started this blog, I was determined not to just post whatever was going on with me at any given time. I wanted to put up stuff that I found interesting, so I could read it later and be interested or find ideas or whatever. Well something funny happened that is kind of relevent and since I haven't actually had a decent post in a while I'm going to write it.

So I had an idea for a regular blog that i was going to call "Credible vs Incredible" which I may still do. I got through a bulk of the research but never managed to finish the blog. It's still sitting in my unpublished file with about 3 other blog entries that I may or may not complete one day.

First I need to give you guys a little background information. Monday the first of March was the first day of uni, it was also the day of the Sound wave music festival. I had one lecture at 6 o'clock and I thought fuck it I'll get it on iLecture later. I went to the festival and I had a great time. That was until the first song of Faith No More when some complete asshole decides to sucker punch me for no obvious reason from behind. Broke my nose, chipped my teeth, kinda fucked up my jaw, I lost my nose ring and worst of all, I missed FNT, fucking asshole right!

So fuck it, it happened, we move onward. So my first day of uni is the next day, I have a big black eye, a busted nose I had kind of a shit sleep and I'm all fucked up on pain killers. I was kinda struggling, and more than a little self conscious. I was finding it difficult to pay attention and then totally by accident I ended up volunteering to do an oral presentation the next week. So fuck right. But as luck would have it, the topic for the presentation was news sources and values, which happened to be exactly the same topic as my "Credible vs Incredible" post. So yay, my research is done. I spent a day making a powerpoint presentation, I pad out the speech for a little while with some references to the text book and I think I've managed to pull off a fairly decent presentation. I do it and the tutor pulls me to the side at the end and tells me that she wants me to present it in the actual lecture. It was supposed to be this week but God had a little cry and decided to flood the school. So it was cancelled but my tutor came up to me the next day and said fuck it we'll just stick it at the begining of the next one when it's no longer relevent to the lecture topic.

So that's the story of how a half finished blog post and a broken nose ended up with a first year student getting his own segment in the lecture. I've got two weeks holidays now and then the lecture is on the next Monday. Once the lecture is up on the net, I'll cut out my bit and I'll put it up here and that'll be, you know, good.

Peace be with you muther fuckers.

The rise of Atheism

Hey hey! So I'm back from the imensely successful Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne, and I had an absolute blast, met up with a few good people, thoroughly enjoyed the event, the speakers were all first rate, even if I was only able to attend the final day (don't tell anyone but I snuck in to see PZ and AC on the Saturday. I would have been glad to pay but unfortunately tickets had sold out). While I was there I organised a couple of interviews with Youtube Atheist (am I the only one that hates that term?) NonStampCollector, New York Comedian Jamie Kilstein and an impromptue interview with legendary blogger, biologist and all round awesome guy, PZ Myers (whom I've since discovered prefers zee to zed). On top of this, I made a mistake with my flight booking and ended up staying in Melbourne a day longer than I expected, which gave me the opportunity to have a chat with one of the preachers at St Pauls Cathedral, Jim Brady (unfortunately not Phillip Freier).

Click here to Download the MP3

One of these days I'll work out how to do an audio stream.

In case you want to skip my crapping on in between, or your just interested in a particular interview, here's the times

NonStampCollector 1:54
Jamie Kilstein 28:40
PZ Myers 41:24
Jim Brady 55:33

Thought of the day - 2 good

If it sounds too good to be true, there will always be people that call you closed minded for having the gall to investigate the claim for yourself.

Stupid animals gotta taste so good.

OK, so after much thought and continual reminders I've decided that I can no longer justify a meat diet. So yesterday I decided I was going to make the transition to vegetarian. I haven't done very well so far, some guy gave me a silverside sandwich, I hadn't eaten all day and I was starving and the guy was just going to throw it out so I figured that was OK. Also I made up a feed of veg tempura last night, and I had a big bag of frozen muscles in the freezer and I figured, well there's no point in throwing them out so I cooked them up, and they were good.

But today is the first time that I'm actually turning down meat, and worst of all it's free meet, the best kind of meat. My work is doing a BBQ. I would really love a hot dog right now and I know that it's already dead so it's probably not going to do any harm, but I figure that if I'm going to make it as a dirty no good vego, I have to stop thinking of meat as food altogether. There's a couple of documentaries that I heard about that discuss responsible meat and fish eating that I would be very interested in, because I don't actually have any problem with the simple act of killing animals for food, (I'm on my lunch break at work so I don't really have time to go into my whole position on the matter, I'll write about that later) but until I can be sure that certain necessary minimum requirements are met, I just plain can't justify it.

Don't worry I'm not planning on turning into some sanctimonious dick about it. I had to come to the decision through reason and inquiry and I don't expect anyone else to change their mind just because I'm jumping up and down about it. So anyway, feel bad for me because someone just sat down next to me with a big sausy delicious hot dog and I want one! :(

Thought of the day - Martyrs

Someone that allows themselves to die in war expecting to be rewarded in the afterlife for their sacrifice, is not a martyr, but a mercenary.

The Casino Philosophy of Existance

Atheism is often viewed as nihilism, skeptics confused with cynics, proponants of evolution as proponants of eugenics, humanists as moral reletivists (a much subtler topic than the average theist gives credit) and with tragic unironic word play, materialists (those that are so far unconvinced by non material explanations) with materialists (those that hold the accumulation of material luxuries as a high priority). These are the people that believe that non believers are essentially missing something essential about life by not believing. We are shallow, joyless, husks, no real emotional connection to life, because we don't believe it has any real value and when we die it's all over. It pains me to think that there are people that believe that, considering all you have to do is look at Atheists and skeptics today and see what they precepts are doing, very little of it could be thought to be nihilistic, and I have met very few skeptics that I could comfortably describe as cynics, most of them are downright optimists.

Now I may come across as a fairly dark, angry kind of guy in the posts I have written so far but really, that's just letting off steam. Sure there is a lot of stuff in the world that makes me angry, and rightly so, but that doesn't make me an angry person, and it doesn't mean that I don't have hope or that I just hate everything. In fact my experience is that my position is one that is both happier and more optimistic than the average theist's with very little of the negative like hell. I call is Casino Philosophy, and here's how it works.

Imagine that you one day just wake up in a casino with no money. You find that you cannot leave, you're stuck there. You don't know anything about the outside world, or even if there is one, but everything that you need is right there, there's food, drinks entertainment other people, but they all have a price tag. Then some how, you don't really know how, you win some money. You think hey it's not really my money so I might as well have some fun with it. You put it all on 36, and you win. You put it all on 17, and you win. This keeps going and keeps going defying astronomical odds odds and you just keep on winning. This is a metaphor for existance, You've got the odds of the universe begining in the first place, the odds of it taking the form that it did, the odds that our solar system and planet would come into place and everntually become a viable birthplace for our form of life. Then every little mutation, every little changed through evolution, every choice to procreate, every seed selected out of millions. Tracing your own lineage from that first spark of life those billions of years ago and seeing all those branches along the way that didn't make it, all those individuals that, after all this time, just lost the game, and they'll never get another chance. All this culminates for you in the winning of you're own life.

So here you are. You've won astronomical amounts, and you've still risked nothing, because it's all free money and you can't spend it anywhere else. So what do you do? Well here's where you have to really look at the situation and then make some decisions. First of all, despite winning this much, you know you probably won't win forever, eventually you're going to lose. So what does that mean? Well since you came in with nothing, when you do lose, it's ok, you haven't really lost anything. Does that mean what you're doing now is meaningless? Well no because there's no because you're at the casino, and you're having fun, you're having experiences, you're enjoying what you have. Should you just commit to wild hedonism? Again no, because you've come this far and you aren't just going to literally throw it all away, you're going to keep trying, keep taking risks, just see how far you can take it, see how many new experiences you can open up with more winnings. As time goes by you realise that the casino is getting bigger, more doors are opening up, you realise that the better you do, and the more risks you take, the more you are going to see, and the bigger the world is going to be for you.

Now there's all the other people in the casino, what do you do about them. Well you can try and stab them all in the back, try and steel their money, cheat, lie and who knows you may actually stay in the game just a little longer, but sooner or later that kind of behaviour is going to leave you alienated and alone, and that will diminish your opportunities for experiences while you're in the game. But if you work together, form friendships and companions, this will keep you all in the game longer, and will make the game more interesting, it will open you up to more experiences, greater joy, it is in the end, far more satisfying, and you can see that the better people get at cooperating, the more successful people are at the games and the more the casino expands.

But there's still a few things to think about. What are you really working toward? I mean it's fun and all but is there something more? Well maybe there is? It could be that this is all there is, and that's fine because it's pretty good on it's own, but the casino is much much bigger than when it started, and you realise that the work of people before you must have expanded it for you, and that is meaningful to you. So in a way, you can help to expand it further for the people that will come after you, and just enjoy that process in an of itself. But to what end? Is it just an endless stream of people showing up in this slowly expanding gaming house? Maybe, and I suppose as long as it keeps getting better, that's ok. Is it a finite thing, eventually everyone loses and the casino just disapears? Again, maybe, but that's OK too, we haven't lost anything, the casino served a function in and of itself and it doesn't need to be any more than that.

But, what if something else happens. What if people get better and better at cooperating, people get better at the games and are winning for longer and longer, the casino continues to expand and grow? What if there is some critical game changing point? Maybe, one day, we can win everything. We can win the casino and everything in it. We can win unlimmited money so we don't have to play the game anymore, so we never lose. The casino can reach infinite expansion, and all possible and imaginable experiences are suddenly open to people, and we have infinite time and resources to explore them. What if we can find the door, and have a look at what lies outside? That for my money is something worth working toward.

Let's drop the metaphor now and I'll sum out how this view is practically useful for me.

1. We've started with nothing, so there's nothing to lose, except for potential opportunities for experience.

2. Since this is all we know we have, there's no good reason to just throw it away. You want to push it as far as you can, and that means you need to strike a ballance between enjoying the present and preparing for what will be the present tomorrow.

3. Experience is it's own purpose. We should seek to have as many experiences as we can. This means we need to find a compramise between risk and caution. Too little risk and you waste the now, too little caution, and you lose the game too early.

4. Make sure you're happy to lose the game at any time, because every spin of the wheel could be your last, regardless of how safe you try and play it. Make sure that at any given moment, you are satisfied with what you have done up to that moment.

5. Share and cooperate with other people. This provides you with not just advantages in life but a better life. You have more opportunities and more experiences. Friends help you to expand you're world.

6. Remember that most potential conclusions to this great game of life and existence are OK. But some of them are trully great and wonderful, and they are worth working toward regardless of how low the odds are, because we really do have nothing to lose, but everything to gain.

See? It really is all good.

Travesty

Michael Jackson. Old news? Is Zeplin old news? Are Beach boys old news? Is Beethoven old news? Well it depends on what your talking about.

Now on one level, none of these artists should even be mentioned in the same paragraph. But at the same time, you can see how they are all comparable. They were all the best at what they did, and even if you didn't like them, you can't not respect them for that fact.

Now you can easily single out M.J. as the most fucked up, which is to say, if you asked anyone which of these are the most fucked up, pretty much anyone will say Michael Jackson, even though most people don't really now anything about any of the other choices. I'm not defending Michael's choices here, which were, let's face it, less than productive, but at the same time, had little to no bearing on his performance as an artist. But in the eyes off the public it did seem to have an effect on one thing.

The public Jackson, the Jackson that could not be hidden, was one that other human beings, knew, as in totally, cynically, fucking knew, could be manipulated to their own benefit. I don't know how people could not have been aware of this, but I suppose it's the very fact that they didn't notice that made it possible.

Now I could never describe myself as any kind of MJ fan, not by a fucking long shot. But my skeptics mind surely lit up whenever people would talk about Michael Jackson and all the really fucked up shit. Let's start with something simple. The baby over the ledge. Let me just straight up say that I have no idea what the big deal was there, as if there was ever a second in which that child was in any danger. Are people just born with a terrible risk assessment ability, or is just cause Michael did it that people lost their freaking minds? Let me say it in plain English in case you still can't wrap your little mind around it. That kid was in NO FUCKING DANGER WHATSOEVER. None, nada. That child was in as great a risk of coming to harm sitting in it's cot in the hotel room as it was being held securely from a height. Really, think about it. Think about all the situations you would gladly put an infant through that is statistically, orders of magnitude more dangerous than what Michael Jackson did. If you can't honestly name 10 without thinking, then you either don't know your stats, or you are abusing your child by concealing it from reality.

What else is there. When you really think about it, you're not overwhelmed with choices for things to criticize Michael Jackson for. But here's one, and I think it's pretty much fair. Producing a song called "it don't matter if your black or white" after deliberately changing your skin color is, to be fair, begging for criticism. In that regard, the man is a hypocrite, or he is just so deeply embedded in denial that he really can't tell reality from fantasy, which could be true, but that's not really your business now is it. I know, I know, by allowing yourself into the public arena you have to accept they you are open to this sort of attack. But hang on, no one really went after him for that. So there is one real point that MJ could be reasonably criticised and yet he wasn't, people let that one go. Huh? how the fuck did that happen. I was pretty little when he made that song so maybe I just missed it, but either way, pretty confident it didn't get the press that the kid fucking did.

OK. the kid fucking. Why did ANYONE take this seriously AT ALL. I found this to be one of the simplest and most obvious, transparent scams EVER. Here we have a guy that in the eyes of the world is a freak. On top of that he has a weird relationship with kids. In that you know, he actually try's to make the lives of dying kids, slightly less unbearable. If we accuse this guy of fucking our kid, no ones going to question that shit. We'll get paid, destroy and eventually kill a man in the process, but that guys a weirdo so who cares, everyone is happy.

On my cover page it has this quote from Benjamin Franklin "Those that an give up essential liberty to obtain temporary saftely deserve neither liberty nor safety" well I'd like to add that. Those that can give up the liberty of others for they're own sense of safety, deserve neither liberty, nor safety, nor fucking life. You are a traitor to the species and deserve death. The fact that I believe there is no human alive, qualified to meet out that particular punishment doesn't change the fact that you deserve it. Anyway the point is, Micahel Jackson's rights were just trampled on, and the people responsible were those assholes that couldn't face the fact that parents were LYING to make MONEY of a popstar. every aspect of Michael Jackson's life is now a matter of public record. His human rights were completely abused because people were afraid of him and didn't stop to question the claims made against him. There were TWO claims of child abuse made against Michael. Both of which were eventually thrown out of the courts because, that's right people, NO FUCKING EVIDENCE. Of course the average public seems to think evidence is a dirty word these days, as if any effort to actually try and distinguish reality from fantasy is an assault against humanity.

Michael actually paid out on the first claim in the early 90's.

wikipedia extract

The father was tape-recorded discussing his intention to pursue charges, where he said, "If I go through with this, I win big-time. There's no way I lose. I will get everything I want and they will be destroyed forever ... Michael's career will be over". In the same conversation, when asked how this would affect his son, Chandler replied, "That's irrelevant to me...It will be a massacre if I don't get what I want. It's going to be bigger than all us put together...This man [Jackson] is going to be humiliated beyond belief...He will not sell one more record".[93] The recorded conversation was a critical aspect of Jackson's defense against the upcoming allegation made against him. He and his supporters argue that he was the victim of a jealous father whose only goal was to extort money from the singer.[93]

end

I'm not going to bother tracing this quote because whether it's true or not is irrelevant to my point. Fact is the parents of this kid took the deal. what cunt of piece of shit worthless parent could accept a cash settlement for their own child being fucked. I don't care if Michael did fuck the kid, if you accept money for your child's suffering, you're worse than whoever caused your child to suffer. But I don't think that's what happened at all. I think that these parents knowingly and willingly destroyed a man for their own financial gain. And you know what, I don't even think they are the worst people involved here. The greatest harm that was done to this man, that for all his faults, never, and I mean never, sought to do any harm to his fellow human beings, the greatest harm was done by the public. The public that instead of using their fucking brains, and doing what they should have done, namely taken the children off the parents that could so horrifically abuse their own children for financial gain, instead decided to attack a man that by every public record that was ripped out of his PRIVATE life, sincerely wanted, and took every measure he could to make the world better for him having been in it.

So for the last few years of a life that should have been venerated and honored as a good and decent philanthropist and humanitarian, wholly apart from being an incredible musician and artist, other human beings, ignorant assholes, drove him to an early death after years of shame and rejection. I hope you are all happy with yourselves. You killed this man.

This is not old news. This is the same news that's been repeated for thousands of years. Anyone that stand for something trully good in this world must be crushed. Celebrities in particular can't reach beyond puppet politics. They must maintain the standard of mediocrity and bland universal morality, seeing as they are the holy priests of the new religion, hollywoodism. And anyone that strays from the status quo, must be stopped.

The treatment of Michale Jackson for his last few years of life is a fucking travesty, and I can only hope that some people will learn something from this lesson of history.