Wednesday, June 06, 2012

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

In an existance full of Infinite Universes

According to the many-worlds interpretation, there are countless number of Earths where Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin never made it. These Earths are culturally more robust for it.

Saturday, May 19, 2012

Matters of the Heart

Be careful when taking advice on love from another, they are not unlike the rocket scientist who says, "It should take off, the math says so."

Saturday, May 12, 2012

My only regret

It is such a beautiful day outside, I only wish I had a pretty girl with which to share it with.

Saturday, April 28, 2012

Screw you Franklin.

Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.
- Ben Franklin
 
Apparently Old Ben didn't like sleeping in, just sleeping around. Well Ben I got a saying for you; no glove no love, unless of course you like syphilis.

Wednesday, February 01, 2012

Where is Captain Planet when you need him?

Imagine this; someone from the future shows up out of thin air (like they often do), and tells you a horrid story about how in the future humanity consumes itself through its nearly immeasurable hubris. This traveler shows you hours of evidence, proving beyond the shadow of a doubt the validity of his claim. Then he tells you that unless you and the rest of humanity changes its course, one thousand years from the time you occupy, humanity will be destroyed.

Do you think, "Well I've got to get on saving the human race!"
Watching House is much more fun than saving humanity.

Or perhaps you think, "One thousand years from now? Fuck it." And then you show the time traveler the door, and go back to watching House, or whatever it is you t.v viewers watch.

If you fall into the former group, good job! You are compassionate enough of a person to not only care about yourself, which is difficult for many people, but you also care about people whom you can never meet. Thumbs up! Don't let go of that.

If you fall into the latter group, well I'd like to call you a dick, but you have a point. One thousand years from now? Why give a shit? No one can give you a single logical reason to care! You'll be dead! Your children will be dead, their children will be dead, and their children will be dead. Anyone born in your gene pool who you can meet and connect with will already be dead by then. So why care? Just enjoy yourself! Toss that extra large drink container out the window! Buy the biggest, baddest, most wasteful penis enhancer of a vehicle you can afford! Hell buy it even if you can't afford it! Only buy vegetables that have been pre-cut, and packaged in three separate layers! Just enjoy yourself because you only live once.

Now I would like to speak to those of you who fell into the former group again. Stop playing fair, throw that compassion out the window on this issue. Because I can tell you for a fact, the latter group up there ^^^^^, could care less whether humanity, the planet, or the Red Boobied Jack Warbler lives or dies. They don't care, either because they will be dead, or they think they are going to be raptured long before the future even comes. You can't convince these people over to your side, because you have nothing to offer them. So play dirty, put money behind your agenda, use propaganda, just do everything and anything necessary to win.

Or you could just what I do, try to reason with people in a vain attempt to change minds without violating a strict set of moral principles.  While an unshakeable feeling of utter futility slowly seeps its way into every fiber of your being, leaving you a cynical husk of what once was a human being.

Please in this case do what I say, not what I do.

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Mitt Ronmey must love Monopoly

"I love paying the taxes that I am legally required to, and you should too."
News flash! Mitt Romney is filthy rich! Wait aren't most politicians egregiously wealthy? Well yes, but old Mitt you see made twenty one point seven million dollars in 2010, and paid only 13.9% of that in taxes. How he was able to do this was through some very smooth legal maneuvers that hid a good deal of what he made from the IRS. Now before you ask, the answer is no, you may not legally dodge paying your taxes. Or at least you could if you made significantly more than you do now.

What did Mitty have to say about this, 

"I pay all the taxes that are legally required and not a dollar more... I don't think you want someone as the candidate for president who pays more taxes than he owes." 
 
Then from the ABC article we get this,

"That may be true, but some tax experts say Romney took advantage of loopholes in the system to pay a lower rate. "All these disclosures, all these complicated, expensive transactions, all aimed to reduce his tax," Wilkins said. "The overarching message is, this is the way the tax system is tilted towards the wealthy. These are advantages middle income people don't get." 

So taking this together I think I can better rewrite Mitt's previous statement,

"I pay all the taxes that are legally required, based on laws which favour people like me, who are of far greater means than you. I don't think you want someone as the candidate for president who pays more taxes than he thinks he owes."  

I agree wholeheartedly Mitt, I'm also willing to play by the rules when they are set up in my favour. 

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Sticks and Stones May Break my Bones

What harm can words do? Sticks and stones right? Unfortunately this old school yard aphorism only  applies to jeers, cat calls, and to the incessant taunts of ones peers after a nasty spill off the high swings. In the world that we adults occupy however, words can hurt, they can harm, and are wielded often with the intent to do both.

Luckily, or not, for us though we have laws that limit such hurtful speech, like liable laws, and laws against hate speech. The best these laws can do for us however is punish the worst examples, examples which would fit right back in the school yard. Some of the more insidious, and potentially damaging examples of speech in our society can't be legally restricted, but non-the-less needs to be checked.

Recently a perfect example of this sinister speech popped out of the mouth of Natural Resource Minister Joe Oliver,

"Get off my lawn you dirty hippies."
"Unfortunately, there are environmental and other radical groups that would seek to block this opportunity to diversify our trade... Their goal is to stop any major project no matter what the cost to Canadian families in lost jobs and economic growth. No forestry. No mining. No oil. No gas. No more hydro-electric dams... Threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda," 

Nothing in what Oliver said there was even remotely illegal. Not a thing. That doesn't mean however that what he said was ethical, or correct. In what is considered civilized discourse calling the people who disagree with you radicals, and saying they want to hijack anything is generally not acceptable. Nor is trying to manipulate your audience by incurring the specter of impeding economic down turn when you can't possibly know that is the case. To put it more broadly, claiming that your opponents are all nut job misanthropes isn't proper debate strategy, and it doesn't make for a healthy Democracy. This is how words can hurt in a broader context, they damage our ability to maintain our freedom. We  cannot have freedom of speech when those in power can simply shout down dissenting opinions, when the electorate fails to take those in power to task for such flagrant abuse of language, or worse still, when the electorate is taken in by these tactics. 

If we are unwilling to do something about these verbal violations, perpetrated by those we choose to govern us, do we even deserve the freedom we have?


Wednesday, January 04, 2012

High Pay? No way.

Right now as I type this the richest 100 CEOs in Canada have already made fifty thousand dollars so far this year. Yes they already made more than the average Canadian will make this entire year, and it's rising

Now this is not going to be a rant. I'm not going to complain about how unfair it is that someone out there is making thousands of times more than me in one day of work, when I am fairly certain that my job is many times more taxing than his. No this post is not about that, because life isn't fair, there will always be some kind of imbalance from one person to another. 

The problem I have with this disgustingly excessive phenomena is not the massive difference in compensation, but the threat this difference poses to democracy. In our world money is undoubtedly power. When you have money you can go places other people can't, be heard when others are ignored, and can garner respect even when you lack the quality of character to actually earn it. In the case of your rich and beautiful celebrities this is not so much a problem, they mostly stick to using this influence to inflate their already enormous egos to bursting. That or they try futilely to solve the world's problems by being in a bunch of gimmicky commercials, not realizing that a series of far richer people make a profit off of human misery. Right here is where we run into our problem, what these CEOs are good at is making money, and they love making money. So why wouldn't they use the money they already have to unduly influence the democratic process? Maybe use their enormous piles of money to be heard and respected by just the right people. Why wouldn't they if it meant making more money?

Ok I'll stop for second. Maybe not every one of the one hundred richest CEO's in Canada is using the influence their money can buy to derail our democracy. Maybe none of them are. The problem is though that the possibility still exists, the possibility that any one individual (Joking, any one man) can use their exorbitant wealth to override the majority's voice. 
Anyone who cares about the very foundation of democracy should see this inequality as what it is, a threat to democracy.