Irrational Focus

Forget nukes or environmental damage, the 20 th century's greatest enduring legacy is our refinement of 'marketing'. Given that insanity, we need to change our formerly pagan seasonal holiday from being some wishy -washy family-oriented value-inspired celebration of some kid born well over 2000 years ago, to one that celebrates the real modern values of Christmas: the power of Marketing! After all -- like lemmings to a cliff -- we succumb to the propaganda wave year after year, buying tonnes of useless stuff for each other so that we can either immorally re-gift it, or just toss it into our basements to await the untold years and inches of dust buildup, before someone else comes along and dumps it into a land fill site where it really should have been sent earlier. They say Christmas was an early propaganda attempt to sway the hordes from celebrating their drunken festivals -- such as Saturnalia -- which would make it a very early form of mass marketing. An historic spin-f...

"The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless" -- Steven Weinberg The key to our spiritual needs is the answer to the question "why are we here?" No other question, in history has ever been answered so often with so many different variations. Yet, for many people they still search for an answer they can accept. It is, of course, our Achilles heel, that fabled weak point to which virtually anybody can seize control of our will and our actions if they understand how to invoke the right magical incantations. Countless religions, cults and other "organizations" have existed since our very origins as a socialized species whose sole claim to control is the possession of this answer. How many of our billions are under some spell or another? It is funny, because it always seems like the little kid in the car screaming "are we there yet?" every five minutes. I mean, do we really need to know why? We've kinda guessed at...

I always knew it was coming. Since I was a kid, somehow I figured that my generation was going to be the one to live through the height of modern civilization. We were destined to get to the other side and see a long slow steady decline. Maybe it was all of that nuclear paranoia, or the talk of asteroids. It might be those sci-fi books on biological disasters, or our more recent understanding of our own environmental consequences. One thing is certain, I am convinced that the end is coming soon and fast. I feel kinda like one of those crazies on the street with a picket sign prophesying our impending doom. "The end is nigh", it says. You just can't live through that much anti-propaganda and still remain positive. I figure that for all of the potential environmental, biological or natural disasters, we're most likely to do it to ourselves. We are overwhelmed by the sheer number of indicators that are leading the way. We feed on fear in the news. The media keeps deliver...

We are gathered here today to lament our old friend character. Dead; due to our conformist desires to all dress in the same dark colors, shop at same annoying thrifty stores, repeatability watch the same bad plots and listen to the same recycled music. A premature demise driven by the miracle of globalization that not only made our world smaller, but also shrank our culture, our food and quite possibly our minds. We now look and sound so similar that even the weirdest are barely distinguishable; our own mothers couldn't tell us apart. The end clearly visible in our daily zombie march towards the grey lifeless towers where we create endless rules and marketing campaigns to bind us to our hollow existence. We huddle together claiming freedom, but fearing to use it. What a wonderful species we will be when we can no longer detect ourselves in the masses. A dark dull army consuming our way through the last of the planet's resources. And not a character amongst us. Farewell old fri...

I'm such a fool. No, really I am. I keep daydreaming that if I write a really good post, one that is entertaining and worthwhile people will actually come to think that I am smart. You know, if indirectly I write that I am smart, then people will believe it, and so in the end I will be smart. But alas, no. I probably can't write something smart enough to get beyond my own foolishness. It would be nice to be famous just for being famous. There are certainly a lot of examples of that going around; that has to be the craziest thing ever. If you can exploit being famous, then you can get the freedom to do the things in your life that you put off because you are too busy not being famous. Or does fame eat too much of your time? Perhaps, I should just settle for rich? Or do I have to get famous to find a quick way to get rich? I am certainly getting too old to spend too much time trying to get rich the slow way. Still, I can't help thinking that people will listen to me if I am f...

Instinctively -- when you encounter one -- you know that you are looking at a bloated bureaucracy; the real question, is how to prove it? We obviously need some simple form of cost-based accounting, that gives us a decent metric on which to compare various organizations and their effectiveness. The key here is the the measure be simple and that it cannot be subverted by those trying to apply it. Clearly, it is in a bureaucracies best interest to hide its own inner ineffectiveness; that is the very essence of why the organization is defective in the first place. To keep it simple we only need to deal with two basic observations. The first is that at the end of the day all organizations produce either products or services, nothing else. Regulatory monitoring for instance, is just a service for the public to insure that the rules are followed. Building roads is a product, while maintaining them is a service. Everything falls into one or the other category. The second observation is that a...

Lonely in a sea of humanity? Urban dwellers encounter so many forgettable people on a daily basis that they feel entirely anonymous. It is funny to be surrounded by people, but to not notice. Faceless faces. Within that sense, we tend to not care much about about our behavior in public. People who would never be rude to their friends or acquaintances, have no problems behaving horribly towards strangers. They feel they won't ever see them again, so why bother being polite. The bigger the city, the better the odds of not seeing those people again. As more people congregate in larger groups, their behavior when they are alone degenerates. It can be wonderfully horrible in a big city to observe just how low people will let their behavior slide. It is not just that sense that the other people don't matter, so you shouldn't bother to be nice to them; some people actively go out of their way just to behave poorly to others. On crowded city streets it is noticeable, but it reaches...