I Hate Cockroaches

So there I was, minding my own damn business at 10:56 PM (22:56 for people in smart countries), trying to put some milk into a glass to be put in the microwave oven so I could get to sleep, when my brother walks in and says: "Whoa, a cockroach!"

So there it was. A big, fat, hyperactive cockroach, as if on cue, buzzed off the table and under the fridge. "Great," thought I, "that's gross, but at least now I have an excuse to not go after it." What a fool I was. It crawled up the side of the fridge and promptly flew past my face onto the stove top, at which point I resolved that it was my manly duty to try and squish the thing with a paper towel and throw it in the trash, after which I would take a shower and wash myself with bleach out of disgust.

So there we were. Man and cockroach. Strength against speed. Paper towels matched against one of nature's most successfully adapted gross things.

The odds were not in my favor.

I made my first lunge, and my first mistake. In my haste, I must have blinked or looked away, because it scuttled off just inches away from where I had aimed. That was the blunder that ruined everything: now it knew that I was after it, and so it ran behind the jar of sugar, and waited. Damn. Now I had to reach out with my unarmed hand to pull the jar away so it would come out into the open again.

I pulled the jar towards me, and it scuttled out just as I knew it would. But then something disastrous happened, something that would show me just how badly I blundered by missing it the first chance I had.

It hid under a napkin, behind a cake stand.

I knew then that I was defeated, that the little fucker was beyond my power to destroy. But I had to try: using the back end of a flyswatter, I pulled the napkin away, prepared to remedy the mistake I had made by missing it thirty seconds before. All for naught; that six-legged piece of shit ran across the countertop, over the edge, and into an open drawer.

It's still there. Plotting, waving those creepy antennae around. I failed to destroy it, I've doomed us all. There's nothing left to do but fill the house with bug bombs and light it on fire. Then there'll be nothing left to do but get drunk.

Accursed fate, why dost thou torment me so?!

Reasons I don't like Texas, #236: If everything is bigger in Texas, then fuck that! I refuse to go anyplace where the cockroaches are any bigger than their already-intolerable size everywhere else.

Enough. I can't stand it.

This is all but the last straw. These United States I live in are filled to the brim with stupidity incarnate.

An ABC News story reports the opening of this shiny new museum that portrays Biblical six-day creation as fact and the theory of evolution as a source of evil. Some douchebag creation "scientists" claim that the theory of evolution provides no logical basis for moral behavior. Wouldn't that make those of us who actually understand biology even more admirable, to behave morally because we believe it is the right thing rather than fear of eternal damnation? Evolution provides no absolute morality because it's not a belief system or a life philosophy: it's a scientific theory, with a basis in fact and in logic. Creationists demonize evolution by pretending that it is some sort of alternative Bible. Who else smells bullshit?

The report says 60% of Americans believe in six-day creation. I don't know how much of that statistic is made up, but I don't doubt that the majority of Americans are nearly as soft-brained as the rest of the world thinks.

This is just fan-fucking-tastic. Now students everywhere will be giving their science teachers hell and backing their side up with reports of the fancy animatronics they saw in a museum.

I wonder if the remaining 40% would be willing to move with me to Canada. Maybe there's some room in Europe. I can only take heart in the knowledge that the number who understand evolution is greater than it was... I hope it continues to grow before the American Inquisition gets me.

Theism vs. Atheism: Moot Point

While I normally don't like taking sides in the God/No God debate, I have found a third side that makes the debate into a triangle. Whether or not there is an infinite God is a moot point.

One thing these two camps have in common is a claim that an infinite something or other exists. Theists claim the existence of an infinite God–infinitely powerful, controlling everything in the universe in some way. Scientists (not necessarily atheists) generally agree that the universe itself is infinite, without end.

In a universe without end, it follows that the possibilities are also endless, and that the world as we know it, with all of its physical laws, is but one of the possible outcomes. Furthermore, a God that is infinite encompasses everything in the universe.

But how can one infinite thing contain another? It is not possible per the very definition of infinity. Two infinites cannot share the same space; they must overlap. Not only do they overlap, but also they overlap completely, and therefore they are functionally the same thing. God and the universe are both infinite, meaning they are everything, but everything does not contain everything, everything does not come from everything, everything is everything. It is itself; God and the universe are each other.

God and the universe are the same thing: primordial existence, endless being that contains all things. For argument's sake, let us again separate these two ideas, and begin again with the premise that God is infinite.

The mathematical value of infinity contains the number zero; that is to say, everything includes no-thing. A God that is infinite therefore contains No-God as part of its everything-ness. If an infinite God exists, then we live in a world where God and No-God coexist as part of the same being, making the debate between theists and atheists moot.

If we begin instead with the premise that the universe is infinite, then God and No-God must both fit somewhere in that infinity. Even the atheistic view of an infinite physical universe necessitates the existence and the non-existence of God at the same time.

Just as the number infinity continues to be infinite no matter what other numbers are added or subtracted to it, so too do human concepts fade to insignificance when compared to the concept of endlessness.

I wrote this last night in a last-minute rush to finish a portfolio for my English class. Inspiration struck me when I least expected it, and left me unconscious.

Bringing Discordians together

I am a newbie in the world of Discordianism, so my enthusiasm for it may seem silly to some people. Since I don't much care about how silly I seem to other people, however, I'm trying to contact as many Discordian interweb-users as my attention span will allow.

This is partly because I want to attract some new members to the Discordian forums, which also happens to be new on the scene, as is the wiki attached to it.

I'm hoping that some of the Old Guard can be roused to contribute their marvelous discord and confusion to this new melting pot. And yet, I hesitate to contact just anybody, because I fear that putting too many Discordians and SubGeniuses in one place will cause a memetic explosion. Although...

Maybe that's a good thing.

Anyway, the mossy coconut is doing quite well now. The moss is returning to its healthy green color, after drying out and turning brown some weeks ago. Several new fern leaves have sprouted up, and surprisingly, the old ones have not dropped off like they did last time. I'll get a new picture of it up soon.

Also, I got the awesomest thing ever: a miniature Stonehenge model! I'll get a pic of that too...

Ooh, brain food

I just watched this, and I think it's a remarkably succinct description of terrorism and the effects it has. Because terrorists do not have a sufficiently powerful military machine to attack their enemies directly, they use dramatic tactics to instill a disproportionate amount of fear in the societies they oppose.

The role of government in managing terrorism should be to ensure that the fear and panic is not out of proportion with the reality of the situation. Instead, President Bush and political pundits have done the exact opposite, by telling us just how dangerous and evil the terrorists are and how intent they are on killing us and our families.

Frightening people this way is exactly in line with the goals of the terrorists.

And this entire post is entirely in line with me pretty much ripping off Ze Frank. Sorry.

Discordia, and whatnot

Discordopedia, the Erisian encyclopedia with five tons of flax, is open for business. Actually, it's open for people to start adding content, and that may take some doing.

Anyway, an update on the mossy coconut: it has a completely new set of leaves, so it really doesn't look anything like what the picture up there shows. Also, I've been watering the thing like crazy, to keep the moss from drying out any more than it has already.

I miss the Show with Ze Frank, but brooding won't help anything. Oh well.

(Intellectual) history repeats itself

These days, we like to pride ourselves on our ability to understand things more clearly than people of past generations. Removing sexism and racism from our literature and academia is certainly no small feat, but many issues seem to keep recurring as if no one had taken them seriously before.

The example I was thinking of is popular culture and its adverse effects on intellectuals. Thinking people, it seems, have always felt like a minority struggling against the blissfully ignorant stupid people. Robert Anton Wilson said that "the strongest conspiracy on the planet is the conspiracy of the stupid," and the truth behind that is almost hilarious when you think about it. All the talk about government conspiracies is made up of three parts: (1)the real conspiracy, which in my opinion is neither as powerful as some claim nor is it non-existent, (2)the joke conspiracy, which lampoons reality and reminds us to think twice before we believe what we're told, and (3)the conspiracy which is not an organized group that rules the world, but rather the sum total of human ignorance.

Believing that the majority of problems in the world is caused by general ignorance and stupidity is not a new one. Henry David Thoreau wrote "The whole ground of human life seems to have been gone over by their predecessors, both the heights and valleys, and all things to have been cared for." Way back in the 1850's, people already knew that we were repeating ourselves. Thoreau talks about the Classical Greek writers and their seemingly incredible wisdom, and even more incredibly the fact that most people live in profound ignorance of them.

What the intellectuals want more than anything else, I think, is for everyone to be as smart as they are. They have wanted this for a long time, probably ever since being a reclusive scholar in an ivory tower ceased to be cool. Of course, they gathered in those ivory towers in the first place because they wanted to be with like-minded people, but that's beside the point.

The point is, if you've had any truly revolutionary ideas or thoughts, from yourself or from someone else, you should be proud of them, but also remember that someone else has probably thought of them already. Don't shirk history and old writings because they're old; accept the fact that those old books and ideas have persisted for a very good reason. Intellectuals of the past knew that they could not change the world around them in their own lifetimes, so they wrote down what they had learned in the hopes that others would use them to accelerate their own mental growth. We have, knowingly or not, inherited a legacy of fabulous intellectual wealth, and this "Information Age" we live in gives us the power to access as much of it as we choose. There is no shame in standing on the shoulders of giants, since it would be an insult to those same giants if we say "No thanks, I'll reach enlightenment and save the world on my own, if you don't mind."