Craig's Blog

Just a wafer thin mint....

Check out the guy to the right - “uh I dink I buy new scooter tommorow“

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/040129/photos_od/mdf459693

Vote for me or the kitty gets it!!

Population explosion

K5 has another good discussion going on --

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/1/22/173143/411

I find myself hanging out there more and more. Good stuff. This one is like retreaded tires, been discussed for years now, what to do about the population explosion. Good discussion down in the posts about what will happen when the species important to our food chain start going extinct. The more I read about the more I'm swayed that we should take a hands off approach, let nature take care of it via AIDS, wars (soon to be nuclear), famine, etc. They talk about how the rich countries should educate and build the economies of the poor states to level off the population growth. History has shown that an educated working class of people tend to have less children. On one side I think why the heck should we fix their problems? They're the ones that chose this path of over populating their societies, allowing dictators to rule them, etc. Then on the other sooner or later we are all bound together, what they do does effect us, via terrorism, destruction of the environment and food chains, etc. If we do lend a helping hand perhaps we should use draconian methods like forced sterilization of 50% of the population, forced Western style education, limiting religous fundamentalism, etc. I'd hate to be around when and if we ever resorted to that though, can you imagine the uproar that would cause? Anyway maybe it's a worn out discussion, the path is clear what to do, it's just getting the courage to do it.

Women's Viagra

My friend Chris keeps a running list of his recently read online/offline articles and books. One of his recent articles is from Time magazine --

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040119-574884,00.html

Typical Time magazine article, biased and trying to run up the reader's 'lusions to derive excitement and subscribe to their magazine. Irresponsible journalism at it's best. Anyway what I think is interesting is that nature puts limits on sexual desire to control population yet we keep finding ways of circumventing it. I still like the idea from Logan's Run where people can go to a room and have sex with anyone/anyway. Imagine a society with no sexual frustration? I guess the downside is societies do sink a lot of binding value in sexual morals. Sexual drive is a hard coded attribute of humans much like food and xenophobia. How has our society fared in the food department? For all intent we have free food available to us, we can eat as much as we like in any variety. I think everyone agrees we are a fat ass nation as a result. We've grown up in the last 30-40 years to blame someone else for our overindulgances, like drugs, smoking, eating, etc. It's society's fault, the environment, my parents, my goverment, my god, my congressman, my neighbor, etc etc. But we no longer deal with fear of starvation, working ourselves hard so we can eat another day. Very little work can feed yourself cheaply today. Has the work ethic suffered? Why work full time when I can easily afford a McDonald's value meal? Maybe that's oversimplistic. What if we had free accepted sex available outside our typical marriages and relationships? How does the sexual drive influence us individually and as members of a society? Perhaps I should brush up on Psych 101.

We're doomed now

Life in America

So if I wore a button that said "I am a suspected terrorist" how long would it take for me to end up in jail? The truth is we are all suspected terrorists in the eyes of our goverment, no one is innocent. The danger is that we are falling into a 'lusion that it's ok to give up our civil rights such as free expression and privacy to our goverment in the name of “fighting the good fight“. We refuse to use our minds to think through what sets of rules the goverment is feeding us. In the end most of us are sheep and are more than willing to accept brainwashing. Perhaps there are better ways of fighting terrorism other than bullets and strip searches. I read this quote today, seems to express my views on the state of America --

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, (which is) always followed by a dictatorship."

"The average age of the world's greatest civilization has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence. From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance, from abundance to complacency; from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back into bondage."

So can we stop this seemingly eventual decay that has been playing out for centuries? Perhaps we can. It seems the civilized world suffered through hard times under the fist of kings and god-head rulers for most of it's existence, with the faint glimmerings of the spark of liberty shining every so often -- keeping the fires burning in the hearts of all humans. It does seem that once a new continent (North America) opened up the freedom seekers took flight to it and got rid of the yoke of intolerance. Is this what is needed today? Are we too crowded on Earth to allow social and political experiments to prosper, to rid ourselves of the established ruling order? It seems to me that's the case. Dare I say we as citizens of the rich countries push our goverments (we the people?) to explore the neighboring planets and other places (space stations) that can harbor life? To allow new cultures, societies, ways of thinking a chance to survive and see if it's worthwhile. Maybe space is the final frontier --  the final hope for humankind to finally escape the cogs of history.

fcuk you

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.

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