HBO Special: Louis C.K. - Oh My God Trailer

Nothing really to say.

"Better to forget and be happy than to remember and be sad"

An encouraging article, so be calm and don't worry about remembering it!

"Deb Roy, a cognitive science professor at MIT studying language, recorded 8-10 hours daily of the first three years of his son's home life. He compiled a quarter million hours of audio and video, creating a 200,000 gigabyte "ultimate memory machine"(most computers store about one gigabyte)."

Largest structure in universe found — and it's mind-boggling

Largest structure in universe found — and it's mind-boggling

And why is that?

Laura Jane Grace MTV's House Of Style

There is freedom in death...

and euphoria.  Not even love can save, or so I interpret this film as.

Death By Disorder

As suicide dominates my mind this Xmas season I thought I'd post some shit I wrote back in July of 2002:



I sit and wonder why
for so long I've wanted to die
and everything I do
even though none of it is new
tears my security away
my stability cannot be kept at bay

And I would have thought
that by 24 I'd have been taught
how to make it in this world
and how to live out the wisdom I borrowed
but with anxiety owning me
my personal identity
can't be free

And with my worst fear
of each cigarette's end near
I live through these days
with enjoyment in a haze

And positivity giving me hope
I decide again to cope
Only to be denied
every hope or dream I've tried

And during the last breath of life
optimism is the knife
which cut the jugular wide
and motivation must abide
by the anxiety which consumes
and in the end brings all dooms

If only I could be
the part of me I can see
when ruminations are left alone
and there are no obsessions to clone.

These are the times which are few
between the prescriptions I do
striving to feel good
can't be done like it should

For all dreams end
and all roads bend
The benevolence of life has died
and all truths have been falsified
so I sleep my life away
and desire for consciousness never to stay
since dissatisfaction is what I feel
about myself and what is real
when I can't act how I want
or rid the emotions which haunt

Then I wish I could
be myself as I should
But my heart beats so fast
and my mind thinks so rash
that I can't speak what I mean
and anxiousness drives me like a fiend
Id rather be dead than who I am not
I guess, then, suicide is what I ought
Because the anxiety disorder which is me
is not what I'm going to be.

TropicHELL

This is a brutal lifestyle.  Annual typhoons stealing homes and family members in an already tormented tropical paradise.  I can't help but see the stark cruelty of the natural world as bullshit like this unceasingly destroys all hope as it takes everything else.  Travelling through this region as a devout missionary more than a decade ago, prayer requests often revolved around stability of the weather; I hardly believed them as they explained to me each year their villages are destroyed and rebuilt.

I can't help but wonder why I even read this bullshit.

Does the Universe Have a Purpose?

Please don't watch this video, the economy needs you.  You are not fufilling your purpose by watching this.  Go shopping.  Buy things on Amazon or go to the mall; help out the 'job creators' for they are the backbone to society.  And by 'job creators' I mean rich white guys that rednecks idolize   ;D

In that mole's new home, a story of death is told.

Weird.

Photos of relaxation.

Put on some tunes or something, just fuck it and let yourself go.

Reasons to take the amino-acid NAC:

Because it's good shit and the science backs it.  Alzheimer's, addictions, schizophrenia, bi-polar, OCD and lung cancer are all affected.

Psychopathic boldness tied to U.S. presidential success

Psychopathic boldness tied to U.S. presidential success

An introduction to Humanism

Don't hate on analogies or thought experiments...

else we'd have no moral standard.  Even the biblical cannon was chosen my morality thinkers, with certain books left out due to moral belief.  I see no need to ever vilify a person for an extreme thought experiment analogy, for moral discussion leads inevitably to morals which benefit all.


EDIT:  This blog structure is impaired, maybe virus afflicted, so here's the link.

It's What Moral Philosophers Do

By RICHARD DAWKINS - RICHARDDAWKINS.NET

Added: Wednesday, 08 August 2012 at 8:19 AM - An RDFRS Original

Intellectuals must sometimes venture into realms of the counter-intuitive – and it may be unpopular. When I was debating Cardinal Archbishop Pell in Sydney, he raised easy laughs from the studio audience by simply restating my beliefs, e.g. that a universe could spring from nothing. The partisan audience laughed because it was counter-intuitive: How could something come from nothing? But if intuition was enough, we wouldn't need clever physicists like Lawrence Krauss and we wouldn't need a clever book like A Universe from Nothing.

Similarly, if moral conclusions were intuitively obvious we wouldn't need moral philosophers. Moral philosophers devise difficult and uncomforable thought experiments, which sometimes lead to counter-intuitve and unpopular conclusions, and they are often scorned and vilified for doing what they do. Peter Singer is violently threatened because he dares to ask questions like "Do all humans, no matter whether embryonically young or vegetatively old, deserve more moral consideration than a cow in its prime in a slaughterhouse?" Other moral philosophers ask uncomfortable questions like "When miners are trapped underground, should resources needed to rescue them be diverted to feeding starving children?" As it happens, I would rescue the miners, but I can see that there is a serious argument to be had. Like it or not, that is what moral philosophers do. If all moral questions had intuitively obviously, self-evident answers, we wouldn't need moral philosophers.

Good moral philosophy often requires hypothetical counter-factual examples, thought experiments to push the envelope. A nice example appeared recently in a blog by the scientist and polemicist PZ Myers. He was talking about abortion, and he wanted to make the point that the mother's rights are sovereign, and would be so even under extreme, hypothetical, counterfactual circumstances:

We can make all the philosophical and scientific arguments that anyone might want, but ultimately what it all reduces to is a simple question: do women have autonomous control of their bodies or not? Even if I thought embryos were conscious, aware beings writing poetry in the womb (I don’t, and they’re not), I’d have to bow out of any say in the decision the woman bearing responsibility has to make.

Myers is here doing exactly what a good moral philosopher should do. He is clarifying the point he wants to make (a woman's decision over what happens to her own body is absolutely sacrosanct) and he is clarifying it by a thought experiment – an obvious counterfactual. The counterfactual is an embryo who was fully conscious and could write poetry in the womb, and he is saying that EVEN THEN he would listen only to the woman.

Now a reasonable person could disagree with him here. A humane rationalist could be pro-abortion under existing conditions, but anti-abortion under the counterfactual condition of the Myers thought experiment – the conscious, poetry-writing embryo. That is the whole reason why Myers found it worthwhile to invent his excellent thought-experiment.

No doubt PZ would come back with good counter arguments and my point is not to have those arguments here. My point is that this is a legitimate argument to have, that it is the kind of argument moral philosophers have all the time, and you cannot have such arguments unless you are prepared to take seriously, and respectfully, counterfactual, counter-intuitive thought experiments of exactly the kind Myers here does, and Peter Singer does, and other moral philosophers such as Jonathan Glover do. The Myers counterfactual of the conscious, poetry-loving embryo is an excellent thought-experiment because it serves to sharpen and clarify a genuine and serious moral disagreement.

That is what Sam Harris was doing in his notorious discussions of torture and of profiling in airport security. He was doing what moral philosophers do, and he does not deserve the vilification and viciousness that he has received in consequence. He is not a gung-ho pro-torture advocate, he was raising precisely the hypothetical, thought-experiment type of questions moral philosophers do raise, about whether there might be any circumstances in which torture might be the lesser of two evils – thought experiments such as the famous "ticking hydrogen bomb and only one man in the world knows how to stop it" thought experiment. I am not coming down on one side or the other in that argument. Only saying that it is a serious moral philosophic argument. Merely to take it seriously and engage in it, as moral philosophers do, should not be grounds for pillorying and personal insults.

Black Me Out

I don't ever want to talk that way again, 
I don't want to know people like that anymore,
As if it was an obligation,
As if I owed you something

Black me out, I want to piss on the walls of your house,
I want to chop those brass rings off your fat fucking fingers,
As if you were a king maker,
As if, As if, As if, Black me out

I don't want to see the world that way anymore,
I don't want to want feel that weak and insecure,
As if you were my fucking pimp,
As if I was your fucking whore

If the crows ain't down, you ain't gettin your mail, homie.

Mail delivery resumes after crow attacks - Weird News - Canoe.ca

Many of Canada's bird populations in deep decline, report says

Many of Canada's bird populations in deep decline, report says

AOKIGAHARA SUICIDE FOREST

Interesting little 20min documentary.

Saw a hummingbird today, I was stoked.

He was aggressively chasing his mate. Those little Rufies go crazy sometimes.

Saw a White-crowned sparrow too. Don't see them too much, but a lot where out today at the 'ol Stewart farm on Crescent.
The Golden-Crowns were out too, as their golden crowns grow in slowly for the season. Or something like that.
And the Goldfinch is always a cool bird to see. Not too many yellow creatures around these days.