Irrational Focus

The rapidly tiring fad of the day is that we’re all going to collectively meet our end from nuclear war, asteroids, global warming, a pandemic, financial collapse, bad diet, a nuclear meltdown, acid rain, cancer, an ice age, violent crime, toxins, an old age home, aliens or any number of other immediate “threats” that are use to continually scare us into passivity.  This month it’s, ummm, errr, …., don’t know, I forget. Ironically, the real threat to humanity seems to come directly from us. Most people, most of the time are walking around doing things, making choices, interacting, but they have their brains completely shut off. They’re over-whelmed by the exponentially increasing complexity of our societies, and in response to this, they’ve decided that trying to get anything done -- anything at all, even if it is stupid -- is far better than having to sort out the underlying problems. It’s full speed ahead, right over the cliff. Of course, this shallow depth and...

Platitudes are just poor advice wrapped in a sugary coating. Easy to generate, easy to digest, yet impossible to utilize. For every opinion, right or wrong, smart or stupid, sane or crazy, there is at least one person holding on to it. The only problem we can’t collectively solve is ourselves. Human intelligence is clearly more advanced than a dog’s, but less than it ought to be, and far less than we believe it is. We’re only as smart as our average behavior; whatever spikes we get are quickly leveled by our other moments. Self-centered people often miss the fact that their misery is caused by their obsession. The shallower we go, the faster things will fall apart. A good example is far more noble than just giving in to the norm; they are their own reward and they are worth far more than any pile of stuff, even if the world hasn’t noticed yet. Faith is blindly following people based on their word, science is blindly following people based on their interpre...

Religion is, and should always be, a personal issue. What draws us forward through our lives is between us and how we see the world around us. Extremist, from any religion or organization, seek to cap our diversity and replace it with their own limited perspectives. But people must span the full spectrum of possible beliefs, it is central to our nature, to our intelligence. Uniformity allows control, and control allows domination. Intrinsically we all seek answers. We must. We need answers to explain our lives, and those of the people around us. We need answers to explain the world and why it never matches our expectations. Different people need different answers; no answer, no matter how detailed or how heavily backed by experimental evidence could ever possibly explain everything to everybody. Without answers we search, and when we search we fail to thrive. Answers quell our inner longings and allow us to concentrate on the world around us. Answers are necessary. T...

When I was young the downtown core of Toronto has few people living there. It was expensive and there were very few houses and condos. That changed when Ontario introduced the Rent Registry. The idea was for the province to regulate how much rent landlords could charge. The effect of this regulation was that the price for condo rentals decreased dramatically. The lower price point brought in more people, which in turn created more demand for condos. The result was a boom, as more and more people moved downtown. It turned the burnt out core into a vibrant and interesting place to live. As more and more middle class people flocked in, they populated the streets and bars. The streets turned from desolation to lively and active neighborhoods. The lesson here is that increasing the numbers of middle class living in the downtown causes the entire area to be more attractive. It blossoms. If you chase them away, the core will go back to desolation outside of the 9 to 5 busines...

Protesting can be a good thing. It can be an effective means to draw attention to a viable, yet ignored alternative. Once the status quo gets entrenched, sometimes the only real way to change it -- to progress -- is by applying pressure on the leadership. The suffragette movement did this effectively in the early 20 th century when they held mass protests in order to force governments to allow women to vote. That positive change seems so obvious now that I can barely imagine a world were women don't have equal rights (although sadly, there are still backwards strongholds on the planet where this is true). Protesting was necessary, and protesting was effective. The Vietnam war, the pro-choice movement, Gandhi's Indian independence; there are many great examples where protests were necessary and were effective in promoting change. In all of these cases the outcomes enhanced our civilized nature, we improved our societies with viable, positive alternatives. Gi...

Social Media. What? How can a long series of trivially retarded conversations constitute "social"? How can splatting blurbs everywhere about the little and embarrassing things in your life be considered "connecting with people"? How can people pretending to read your drivel so that hopefully you'll read theirs be equated with "media"? Seriously folks, these systems are fun, but they are merely entertainment. Once the next best things comes in, we will drop them like the brain-dead stupidity that they really are. After all, how much do you really need to know about people's status, particularly if you barely know them? This week's hula hoop is next week's landfill. Get ready to move on ....

Why do things, when it is so much easier to say that you've done them? After all, expending effort requires effort, while just talking about effort only requires a creative enough spin. A misappropriation of the truth, by just the smallest fraction. When they are looking back on the start of the 21st Century the biggest thing they'll note is how we claimed -- so often -- so much more than we did. How we claimed -- so loudly -- so much more than we knew. How we just kept claiming everything, like a pathological liar stuck on 'repeat'. I guess most people think that if they say it, then somehow that constitutes action, and if they say it often enough, it will somehow become the truth. We can talk about a virtual world, a digital utopia constructed cleanly inside of a machine, but when we come around to trying to re-create that alternative reality over top of our modern one we know that we have diverged too far from our center. Too far from what makes us ...

Everybody says they want change. Everybody says that they want to fix the problems. But once it comes down to something they've said, or something they need to change, or even something they can do something about, it is suddenly an issue. Suddenly something to be avoided. Something wrong. We proud creatures seem to be gifted at talking about stuff, but acting on it is another matter completely. We will talk. We will say. But we won't move. Intelligence, that odd beast, is not with us often enough. We float mindlessly through life. Wisdom, particularity when defined to be an understanding of when not to get pedantically caught up in nothingness, is a rare commodity. Thinking, then, is not something most people are actively involved in. In fact, they try very hard NOT to think about things. To avoid those things for which they don't like, or don't want or are just too confusing to them in some vague way. We are a society of willingly blind fools. One tha...

I found the following Toronto Star article very depressing: http://www.thestar.com/news/investigations/article/793087--testing-drivers-on-roads-less-travelled but, not just because of the usual story about the incompetence that we are constantly greeted with by our Ontario institutions. Any one whose has spent time in Toronto knows that we are surrounded by a vast array of bumbling bureaucrats. That they somehow manage to take the simplest things and turn them into laughable jokes, with ease. You'd be laughing if you were so busy getting frustrated with it all. Ontario specializes in having our employees turn off their brains. In that way, we get a large number of perfect automatons, able to quickly and efficiently screw up any task, large or small. More optimally, they do it while somehow managing to blame it all on upper management. It's a gift. No doubt our artificially intelligent droids are happily entrenched in their own mindless misery. We're go...

Most people begrudge learning. They fight it, all the way from kindergarten right up to high-school. If they're destined for a higher education, they take the fight with them to their new institutions. Fear, frustration and fatigue: learning to most people is to be tolerated -- barely -- but avoided whenever possible. There are moments with brief openings, possible opportunities, but beyond that is a high wall setup to protect oneself from outside forces. Outside information. Later in life, long after the learning has ceased and the career has stagnated, what passes for debate is more often people just trying to validate what they know. They aren't open, they aren't interested, they aren't flexible. They aren't discussing. Instead they've locked themselves into their small subset of what they believe is the truth, and they'll just keep digging in farther. Most people out of school don't want to learn new stuff. Perhaps, they don'...

Selfish, greedy, cheap,  rude, irritable, indifference, slimy, smarmy, arrogant, jerk, dirt-bag, creep, sneak, hostile, nasty, angry, mean, hateful, jealous, vengeful, cruel, heartless, soulless, merciless, liar, thief, murderer, brutal, killer, destroyer, sadistic, tyrannical, and depraved. Without them, who'd be left?

We spill out, like primordial ooze into the cracks and crevices of our differences. In every direction we spread, but our bulk stays together, driven from one gorge to another in time to an unseen beat. Our brief moments of thought, get locked into position, like dogs caught fighting over some insignificant morsel. We, who can create, long before we can understand, and yet understand so much less than we can know. A species lost between our origins and our destiny, but hardly ready for carrying our ultimate grace. Hopeful and hopeless, bright and dim, foolish and foolhardy, we keep traveling. Never to forget, that even in the darkest corners, we still need to stop, to think and to appreciate our essence.

If it wasn't for an entire absence of clues, most people would be somewhat aware of their environment, their place in it and the upcoming events that are gradually building up to bowl them over. But instead, they are lost in themselves, stuck on what they don't know, as they blunder onto the highway only to end up as more fresh roadkill, in a society of people competing for unique and novel ways to be flattened. That, it seems, is the ironic weakness of intelligence. It gives us just enough to think that we know more than we actually do; that we have more than we actually do; that we understand more than we actually do. And in this deception people get hopelessly caught flailing around like rapidly dying fish, flung out of the water while spasmodically trying to change things, convinced of their own rather doubtful superiority. But the joke is that most of the people, most of the time, in most places, have switched into some held-back mode were what they barely...

Life presents itself as a series of moments grouped together by a collection of underlying similarities. Much like 'scenes' in a movie, our lives go from one set of these circumstances, to another. In each scene, the world passes us by as we fall into routine. In each scene, we fall into our being. It is not the major scenes that are of interest, but rather the between times, as we move from one to another that hold the most significance. Within a scene we are frozen to our will, unable to recast ourselves, but between them we have those rare moments in life where we can change, where we can exert our free will. It is our choices in between that dictate our successes and failures. For within a scene, we are more locked into ourselves than not. It is as if we were shot out of a canon and are on a defined trajectory headed deep into somewhere. Going nowhere fast. Initially we are given some options, but once out of the tube, the stage is set. Locked in. We, and our nature hav...