The Pessimist

I have been coming to the conclusion that god is in the brain.

In ancient times, gods lived on Mount Olympus and looked down on us and meddled in our lives. Mostly they liked to get laid and cause trouble thwarting our puny plans. There were also gods in the forest, under the sea, in the storm clouds hurtling lightning bolts, etc.

Then some desert based deep thinkers decided that there was only one true god, and that we were made in his image, and that he lived in heaven. Presumably they had been to the mountain tops and didn’t find heaven there, so they moved it into the sky. Heaven is obviously “up there” because that is where all the artists painted it. And Mohammed flew there on a winged horse and Jesus went there floating on a cloud. At least, a few people told us that’s what they saw, and therefore, that must be the way it happened. Why else would they say that and why wouldn’t we believe them?

Trouble is, we have been above the sky now. We’ve been everywhere on the planet: to the poles, under the sea, deep into the earths crust and into every remote place. No heaven was found. We’ve been to the moon, we’ve sent observation platforms to the very edge of the solar system. No heaven was found.
We’ve made devices that can look at molecules. We’ve broken atoms into their component bits. No god, no heaven. We’ve created optical and radio telescopes to look to the very beginning of time and to the farthest reaches of the universe. No god, no heaven.

Where is that little bugger hiding?

Oh, maybe he is in an alternate universe, or in a different time slightly out of phase with ours. But this seems to fall victim to Occam’s razor. As we increase our experience and capabilities, the only “gaps” left to look in become more and more improbable. Do we really need the explanation that there is a big bearded man who created everything and knows everything and is all powerful. who lives in an alternate universe and really cares about us, individually and personally?

We were made in his image: two hands, two feet, two eyes, air breathing, food eating, testicle swinging bearded know it all/nothing. He’s like us in every way (sorry about that testicle and beard thing women), except that he is invisible and lives somewhere we can not see or go to until we die and then can never come back. Maybe, just maybe, he doesn’t actually exist. That would be the simplest explanation.

The only alternative explanation is he lives in our brain. He is the best possible me. I am made in his image because he is me. But that also means that he is you for you, and she is she for her. That truly does make god infinite. But unfortunately, it doesn’t do much for society as there is nothing that compels us to be or want to be like our inner good.

I obviously don’t see the whole picture because my view is filtered through the media. I get most of my US news from the Daily Show and the CBC.
But the dying days of the campaign have revolved around the Republicans trying to paint Obama as the second-coming of Karl Marx.

Calling Obama a “socialist” is the equivalent of calling

• the Pope an atheist
• Mother Teresa a terrorist
• Sadam Hussein a populist
• Joseph Stalin a humanitarian

Do people actually believe this, or is this just campaign desperation?
Interviews at US rallies (John Oliver of the Daily Show talked to Palin and Obama supporters) invariably show followers of one stripe convinced and terrified that if the other guy gets elected, then the first thing to happen will be the total destruction of the United States.
Come on people … really?

Is this just clever editing? Or is this what people really believe? When Jay Leno does “Jay Walking", he invariably shows people who don’t know:

• who is the current vice president
• what country is on their northern border
• who were US allies in WWII
• who “we” fought in the Civil War
• who is the president of Russia

These segments leave the impression that Americans are morons. Jay hints that some editing goes into the process, but how many average Joes does he talk to before he finds the 5 dolts featured? I hope 95 people got the answers right, but I fear that these really may have been the first 5 people he approached.

Back to the campaign … is it really a choice between my candidate and total annihilation? Isn’t the choice really between two candidates who are both upstanding citizens, patriots, heavily vetted, proven, intelligent, honourable individuals. You may prefer one over the other because of certain policy minutiae, or just personal attributes, but the other candidate should also be perfectly acceptable. Why must the campaigns pretend that one is the only hope and the other is Satan incarnate?

Are Americans so stupid that they are actually manipulated by this hyperbolic rhetoric? I guess tomorrow we’ll find out.

OK, now I’ve seen it all. It’s all over the news: Sara Palin says Obama is a socialist because he wants to take away the money from the rich and give it to everybody. Joe the Plumber is concerned that Obama plans to raise his taxes so that he won’t be able to afford to buy the $250,000 a year business he’s currently employed by.

Un-fucking-believable. As I understand it, Obama has proposed raising the personal tax rate on incomes over $250,000 from 36% to 39% (and no change on rates on income below $250k). If Joe the plumber buys this business and has an income of $260,000 then his taxes will be increased by $300. Woopdy-fucking-doo. I think Joe’s bigger problem is where is he going to borrow the money to buy and run this business, now that the uber-fucking-rich have destroyed the economy and made it impossible for anybody to get credit.

The Republicans have cut every conceivable tax on the very rich – income tax, capital gains tax, capital tax, death tax. And that was supposed to help the economy grow strong. Because rich people make the economy strong and taxes are just a drain on their hard work ethic and the government is just going to waste it anyway. Well, do you think that it is maybe time for a rethink?

I’ve never understood the American hierarchy of cuss works. In ascending order of offensiveness it’s bastard, fucker, mother-fucker, liberal, socialist, communist. Obama is now reached the penultimate insult category, so I think that means he must be saying something right - something that drives the stupid people crazy. All the stupid poor Americans who keep voting for republicans who keep giving bigger tax-cuts, incentives and now out-right bail-outs to the rich. “Yeah! I’d like to vote against my best interests. I need to vote for the republicans so the democrats don’t ruin the country".

Every Republican since Reagan has cut taxes and continued spending like drunken sailors on shore-leave. Meanwhile, they’ve exported jobs to Mexico and China, and they’ve run up the biggest national debt, and the largest trade deficit and fiscal deficit ever. Solid stewardship of the economic purse.

The government can find a trillion dollars to bail out Wall Street. They can find a trillion dollars to fight a war in Iraq. But they can’t find any money to ensure that their citizens have access to health care. The best republican proposal is to let the private sector handle health care and he’ll give them $5,000 to pay the premium. (I believe the average premium is already considerably more than that, and with tricky deductibles, co-pays and out-right denial of service, privately insured Americans are regularly bankrupted by medical expenses). But Americans will vote for this in large numbers, and may yet elect another republican. How stupid.

I couldn’t believe they elected Ronald Reagan. I thought Bush 2’s election in 2000 was a fluke, but his decisive reelection in 2004 proved it. Americans are stupid.

ThePessimist sees the odds this way:

• McCain victory 50%
• Obama victory 45%
• George Bush cancels the elections due to the severity of the economic crisis and serves a third term 5%

Tell me I’m wrong.

I’ve only recently become an addict of youtube. Occasionally somebody would send me a link to some funny animation or cute animal vid, I’d watch it and that would be it. If I looked around at all, the most popular videos all seemed to be of face-pierced youths crashing their skateboards, getting hoofed in the nuts, or singing or dancing badly. Or sometime all 4 at once.

But I put “atheist” into the search box and fairly quickly came across padcondell.

I watched it, then watched another and another. Pat has been publishing these videos for about a year, and he currently has 45 posted on youtube. I watched 7 or 8 at my first sitting, killing several hours watching them, and some rebuttals and reading the latest comments.

His shtick is to deliver a 4 to 6 minute monologue directly to camera. His voice is conversational, pleasant, humourous and imbued with a plummy London accent. His topics speak against Islamic extremism, reasonable accommodation, political correctness, and religion in general.

The most amazing thing is, after watching about 20 of his 45 vids, he has not uttered a single word that I disagree with. Stated another way, he says exactly what I have been thinking (and saying on this website), only he says it better, with more wit and humour.

If I weren’t an atheist, I’d make him my prophet or even my god. But I am, and I don’t believe in that kinda bullshit, so the best I can do is express my admiration for the man. By putting his face out there, he is taking a not inconsiderable risk that some religious wacko could whack him.

If he were running for political office, I would definitely vote for him. Canada could use a politician like him.

For more patcondell videos, see his youtube index.

That Winnipeg bus incident was a real shocker. What a nasty way to wake up. My sympathy goes out to the victim’s friends and family, and I hope that Mr. Vince Weiguang Li spends the rest of his life in prison.

There’s a lot of commentary already in the blogosphere about this incident. Comments like Canadians are wussies. Why didn’t anybody take this guy out? I’ll never visit Canada again. I’ll never take a bus again.

I’ve commented before on tragedies of this sort (Virginia Tech). I don’t think I can fault the people on the bus for basically running away. Unlike an airplane, a bus can quickly stop and you can bug out. On a plane, you’re basically stuck there and the situation will likely get worse, so the passengers would be expected – post 9/11 – to overwhelm the bad guy. But how do you go about disarming a mad man on a bus. The space is very crowded, it wouldn’t be easy to mount a multi-person defense. Unlike a classroom or office space where a madman could be surrounded and jumped, a bus would be a single file line up to a serial stabbing. The victim was a goner by the time the slumbering bus passengers were aroused. He couldn’t be helped. I do believe the right action was taken. Just get out. Like when a crocodile leaps out of the drinking hole to take a wildebeest, the rest of the herd is best to just run away.

The other comments are an exaggeration in the other direction. Nothing like this has ever happened in Canada before, or on a bus anywhere in North America. Your life is no more endangered today than it was yesterday. This event was totally without precedent, and there is no reason to believe it was anything other than an isolated incident.

But I’m sure, again, that Muslims across Canada breathed easier this morning … praise be to allah that the crazy man was not a muslim, but a crazy Chinese guy.

In Defense of Atheism
The Case against Christianity, Judaism and Islam
by Michel Onfray

This book was an enjoyable read, but in the end Onfray did not prove his thesis. After the preface, which fished me in, the first third of the book was a bit of a slog. I have to admit after he used the word ontological three times in the first few pages, I had to get my dictionary to look it up.

The preface describes a trip to the middle east where he visited with desert nomads – ignorant people whose way of life, and thinking, had not changed in thousands of years. These people were the very model of the founders of monotheism. And, why would their insights into the world have any relevance to today. The short answer … it wouldn’t.

The second half of the book makes a damning case against the big three monotheisms. They are big fat targets that are incredibly easy to ridicule. But I don’t think he has made a convincing case for atheism. More on that later.

He spends a great number of pages lamenting the fact that atheism is a negative term “a” - “theism” ie. against or not theistic. The theisms all have positive names: the big three names in the subtitle, plus an endless list of nouns and proper nouns: deist, pantheist, monotheist, polytheist, animists, Catholics, Protestants, Lutherans, Calvinists, Shiite, Sunni, etc. He claims that language lacks a noun that describes our beliefs with a positive construction. He doesn’t deal with what I think are positive and suitable descriptors: realist, humanist, scientist, observationalist. But I will grant him that we do not commonly label people such as myself with a name other than “atheist".

The origin of religious thinking is pretty well laid out. Basically man cannot face the prospect that his life is finite. He will die, as everyone before him has, and that will be his end. This being too bitter a pill to swallow, he constructs the fantasy of the after-life. He believes it, despite a total lack of evidence of the truth of it. Nobody has ever seen it, been there, come back or sent back a message.

That actually makes sense. Heaven is perfect .. the opposite of the here and now. No suffering, no death, no want. Believing in an alternate reality is definitely preferable to believing that this is all there is.

Unfortunately, for a made up construct, not everybody goes to heaven. There is also hell, a place, hard to believe, that is actually worse than here. And to ensure that one gets to go to one rather than the other, you need people to help you … priests. Heaven is run by god, who unfortunately never makes a physical appearance here, so these priests must speak for him, and interpret what we must do and how we must act to get to go to heaven instead of hell. And, wouldn’t you know it, giving considerations to the priest will ensure your proper passage over the river Styx. Then to complete the circle, the ruler, who wants to get to heaven as much as the rest of the population, finds that he can use the levers of power (military and property) to control the priests, who organize everybody hierarchically under them.

The priests tell everybody to obey the ruler, because that is how they will get to heaven. Don’t mind all of the injustice here - slavery, poverty, want, cruelty - the next life will be better, do as you’re told.

Phew! In summary, the priests tell the king what to think, the king tells the military how to act, and everybody else keeps their head down waiting for their final reward.

His indictment of the big three is quite entertaining. Each professes that they are the one true religion because they were chosen by god. God has given them a book, which is the true and infallible word of god, written by his very hand. Of course, each book is riddled with contradiction. Best example: “Thou shalt not kill” (Deuteronomy 5:17) “But you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittite and the Amorite, the Canaanite …, as the LORD your God has commanded you"(Deuteronomy 20:17) [That last quote is abridged, as it is apparently a whole chapter on how to get back at the enemies of the Torah.]

All three books tell completely how to live, and bar all other books. So each book - Bible, Torah, Talmud - contain everything and its opposite. This allows the religious to cherry-pick the verse that supports their desired course of action. Oh, and for most of recorded history, the common people were forbidden to read the books (assuming they could) without the presence of a priest to tell them what to think.

The very story of Adam and Eve is a parable that tells us not to think. Eat from the tree of knowledge, and be cast out of the garden. And it is all Eve’s fault for disobeying this direct order, and so 6 millennium of misogyny is justified by the faithful.

The history of the big 3 religions is a rippin’ yarn. Death, war, genocide, torture, slavery, oppression. And first and foremost, the suppression of real knowledge. Original thought (= Original sin), scientific observation, philosophy were all viewed as dissent and disobedience to the church. Books were burned, inquisitors were employed. The best line in this book: “The church was on the wrong side of scientific discovery for every major development in the last 10 centuries". Imagine where we would be if instead of suppressing for hundreds of years each new development in astronomy, physics, medicine, chemistry, biology, etc. they instead allowed the constructive thinking to progress. They could have used their not inconsiderable resources to actually help it along. We could have had colonies on the moon by the 15th century.

Anyway, that was all fun. But I don’t think his “religion is the root of all evil” approach actually proves that atheism is much better. It is, of course. But then, we have plenty of examples of nonreligious societies corrupting absolute power to oppress the majority in favour of the an elite ruling class. Communist China, Stalinist Russia, most of Africa. I do believe that religion has kept us backward and barbaric for all of recorded history. But nonreligious societies have also spun out of control into tyranny. Perhaps man is just not capable of self-organization into an altruistic society.

I’ve been away from this site for a long time. I was on vacation for a while (nice) and when I got back I was both too busy and too disinterested to post anything. I was disinspired by the T-Shirt offered for sale at despair.com that said “More people have read this T-Shirt than have read your blog". There’s a lot of truth to that.

But it is time to talk to the wall again.

I was wondering: Why does democracy work so well here ("The West"?) and not at all elsewhere?

Is it:

• The rule of law?
• The separation of Chuch and State?
• Property rights?
• Human rights?
• All of the above?

It doesn’t work in Africa. In Africa, you give the people the vote and they vote in a tribal strong man, who then uses all of the levers of power to make sure that he never faces a fair vote again.

In the muslim world, you give the people the vote and they vote for Sharia law. The resulting theocracy then declares democracy un-Islamic, and they never vote again.

But here, governments come and governments go. The binary system in the U.S means Democrats or Republicans are in charge for 4 or 8 years. If it goes longer, the president has to change. In the parliamentary systems, majorities are formed which essentially have absolute power, but if they don’t please the people, they are replaced with a different majority or become a minority. And it all happens peacefully.

We never see here leaders declaring “why should I give up power just because the people make a mark on a piece of paper?” At least, we haven’t seen anything like that in the West in 70 years, or over 2 generations, when Germany and Italy had their little fling with Fascism.

It could never happen here, could it? Sometimes I have conspiracy night-mares of a George Bush contrived “war on whatever (enter name of diabolical entity threatening life as we know it)” requiring the suspension of elections ala FDR. While I think that possible, I don’t consider it even remotely likely.

But ThePessimist wonders … what really does bind our democratic societies in place?

CALGARY – Sometimes, even pessimists find themselves admitting their predictions have been too sanguine. Four years ago, Dennis Avery warned that, as Western governments fell head over heels for biofuels, passing laws forcing consumers to buy them, “U.S. farmers, who should be exporting food to densely populated Asian countries with rising incomes, will instead turn their corn into ethanol . . . without benefit to the environment.”

I love it when I’m right. Unfortunately, that’s not going to be a lot of comfort as we race toward apocalypse.

America has managed to turn its addiction to cheap energy into a multi-layer transfer of resources from the poor to the rich. American farmers, wealthy capitalists all despite their cries to the contrary, are the most heavily subsidized farmers in the world. While preaching free trade to the third world, American politicians buy votes in rural america with bags of taxpayer dollars. The bio-fuel boondoggle was a great way to keep the gravy rolling in, since it was exempt from WTO subidy rules (not that they adhered to those anyway) and they could pretend to be green.

But the arithmetic doesn’t add. Fossil fuels were laid down around 100 million years ago, it’s finite and it will run out sooner or later. Oil is millions of years worth of banked solar energy, which we have managed to exhaust in just a few hundred years. We can’t meet this demand with current crop production - one year’s solar energy. But if we could, would it be a good idea? It isn’t if you also want to eat.

With just a bit of tinkering around the periphery, the nominal amount of biofuel production is already affecting food prices. Food riots are already in the news. The world’s poor eat grain. The world’s rich eat animals that eat grain. Global warming is turning the productive grain-belt lands around the world into deserts. And the green revolution (using fertilizer, pesticides and mass production) relies on oil.

Do you see the problem? I’m not sure you do yet. Did you think the food riots in Haiti looked scary? Imagine that on a scale of billions of people with an inadequate or unaffordable diet.

ThePessimist sees a dystopia where the rich will have to eat the poor.

My car was broken into again last night.

Back in January, I inadvertently left my car door unlocked. Seems an opportunity like that doesn’t go unnoticed. Taken was my cell phone and about $5 in parking change. These fuckers must rove the neighbourhood every night flipping door handles and taking whatever they find in unlocked cars.

At least, that was my theory until this morning. Last night my passenger window was smashed out. Taken was my cell phone - again - and about $5 in parking change. I’m assuming it was the same cretin as last time.

So, for $5 in pocket change, and a cell phone that was deactivated and therefore worthless within 12 hours, I have a $200 broken window and the inconvenience, and expense of replacing my cell phone - again. They used a crowbar to break the window and managed to put a couple of scratches in my roof. Estimate to fix that - $700. I’m not fixing it because the scratches are small and the car is a lease. But the point is, some asshole has done over a thousand dollars in damage for a few bucks.

I guess this is a minor matter in the general scheme of things. After all, we’re teetering on the brink of the next great depression. The giant sucking hole that is about to swallow my RRSP savings (and everybody else’s) is going to cost me a lot more than last nights break-in.

A bunch of salesmen earning commissions on mortgages that people couldn’t afford … Bank executives gleefully buying them up so they can take in their multi-million dollar bonuses. Hey, a few inconsiderate fuckers earned a few hundred million dollars last year and set up the economy for a multi hundred billion dollar loss. The similarities are striking.

I have no confidence that the cops are going to catch the guy who broke into my car. I likewise have no confidence that the bank executives are going to have their bonuses taken away from them, or the salesmen their commissions. But why should that be similar? We know who the thieves are in the latter case. Why aren’t they being arrested and charged? Or fired Or sued. There should be some justice in the world.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one …

I have a friend who has a coworker who knew a guy who went on vacation to Mexico. The guy went to a local dive in a seedy end of town and had a few drinks too many. He woke up the next day in a bathtub full of ice. There was a note beside the tub that said “call an ambulance, you don’t have any kidneys anymore.”

Oh, isn’t that scary/funny. Last week you could check the urban legends site and find out that this story isn’t actually true. But this week, change ‘Mexico’ to ‘India’ and now you have a true horror story. Seems there is a thriving criminal entreprise in India that has stolen 500 kidneys from impoverished victims to sell to rich customers.

Should we be concerned about world where this kind of thing can happen? India’s 1 billion people, with 900 million of them so deperately poor that they can just disappear into a meat-pie factory where nobody will miss them, or care. Or China’s 1.3 billion people, living in a command-economy where there have been rumours for decades about executed prisoners having their organs harvested for transplants. Also an urban legend / capitalist scare-mongering? Maybe. Maybe not.

Artificial protien-faking chemicals in pet food. What next? Soylent green … it’s people!

I read this in the local paper this morning. It was just a little snippet of an article on page 7. Bookending this article was the death of two more Canadian soldiers to roadside bombs.

Afghan court orders death for journalism student
January 23, 2008
Record news services

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN
An Afghan court sentenced a 23-year-old journalism student to death yesterday for distributing a paper he printed off the Internet that three judges said violated the tenets of Islam.

The three-judge panel sentenced Sayad Parwez Kambaksh to death for distributing a paper that humiliated Islam, said Fazel Wahab, the chief judge in the northern province of Balkh.

Kambaksh’s family and the head of a journalists’ group denounced the verdict and said Kambaksh was not represented by a lawyer at trial.

A clerics’ council had been pushing for Kambaksh to be punished.

Violated the tenets of Islam! What the fuck? This is a capital offense in Afghanistan!?!

Reread the article above. It doesn’t say that some wasabi imam thinks that this fellow should be put to death. An actual official Afghanistan court has actually found him guilty and sentenced him to death! Whether he has any right of appeal is not mentioned.

Canadian soldiers are not dying in this foresaken shit-hole so that some talibanized court can issue death sentences for printing leaflets or doubting the word of the prophet Mohamad (apostacy).

In a free country, one should be able to say that Allah has a small dick and is lived vicariously through the pedophile Muhammed, and that the followers of islam are hopelessly ignorant 9ths century barbarians.
Name calling can do no harm.

But when the legal structure of sharia law can order your head cut-off because it doesn’t think according to the limited vision of the koran, well, that is just wrong.

If Canadian soldiers want to do some good in Afghanistan, then they should start by taking Fazel Wahab and his two fellow judges off the bench, and shooting them.

At least, that’s what I think. And it’s a free country here, so it is my right to think it, and say it.

It's been a while again since I've written anything here. I really do need to turn over a new leaf and start getting my thoughts out here.

But, this is a rather old version of B2Evolution - ver 0.9.1
It is so old, Fantastico can't even upgrade it. And if I go to the forum to ask for help, the answer is probably going to be ... get the latest version.

Well, I'm not sure if it is the latest version, but I'm in the process of moving to version 1.10.2. The new site exists, but I need to figure out how to bring over all my old postings and configuration settings.
I have a couple of customizations here. I'll have to replace those too.

So, see you here again in a while, if I don't blow the whole thing to pieces.

Backup -- check!