Religious Conspiracy Theorists

Thinking about religion from an atheist perspective often presents problems. Not having ever been deluded into believe in a deity, it's hard to grasp what really goes on in the mind of the believer. Sometimes I feel I may have an insight into whats going on in there, and I like to write it down. It may be right, it may be wrong, but it's a possibility.

One of the traits of conspiracy theorists is to find meaning where there is none. To take something simple, perhaps mundane in explanation and weave an elaborate web of explanations to explain things that don't sound right to them. Take the Kennedy assassination for example. To use a scientific term, a shitload of research has been done on the subject, and it points strongly to the story of Oswald shooting him from the Texas Book Repository. Simple, serene... boring. The conspiracy theorist can't understand how something so profound in its implications could be explained by something so simple. So they tell a story of lies, deciet, deception, trickery, cover-up, and so on.

Personally, I can understand this urge to make things more meaningful. In some sense, I even do it. A squirrel follows me home for ten minutes, and maybe I think he likes me, rather than the fact that he sees the corner of a power bar falling out of my backpack. Sometimes it's an interesting, or even comforting thought to think things are more meaningful than they are. It doesn't mean they are however, and these thoughts should be treated as such.

But given that I can understand this innate human desire to "blow things out of proportion", theists seem to be doing the same thing. The explanation that the universe just began without a purpose, creator, direction, that life is nothing more than a chemical scum with opposable thumbs, doesn't sound very fun. Perhaps the human capacity for religion is simply an extension upon the tendency to create a story where there is none. Could religion be nothing more than an unconsious creation of a conspiracy theory to make the lives of believers seem more interesting?

Again, I don't know. It's an interesting idea, but I'm certainly not going to go out and declare a fucking jihad on anyone who disagrees with my point of view...

Capitalistic Communism

While getting into my car today I saw a CD on the floor. Not a burned CD, but an actual CD of a band I really bought. It got me thinking about how the music industry has changed. CDs are more or less a thing of the past. I know of only a few remaining places in Boulder I can even buy a CD. Clearly much of the music industry has gone online, but there are daunting tasks to businesspeople to deal with to actually produce a profit while competing with music piracy.

While I don't know how they will do it per se, I do know that innovative people will keep the wheels turning on the industry. People will always want music and even if the industry changes completely, bands will still need compensation for doing what they do and the people who organize them will need compensation too.

Websites like Facebook, Pandora Radio and others provide free services and have business models that can produce enough profits to at the very least, stay afloat. There seems to be a trend of people wanting stuff for free, and these businesses have found a way to do that.

Is it possible that in the future, distant or otherwise, that the demand for free products will be so great that an business has to offer a free, or very cheap product just to compete? It's conceivable that the realization of communal goods will end up to be the only real way of competing in a marketplace in the future. That's the idea of capitalistic communism. The sharing of goods, services and information for communal good, while providing funding by the interaction of entities in the supply chain to produce the product.

If this were to happen, I don't think it would get to the point where every product was completely free, because if nobody is paying ANYTHING, there is no inflow of money into the system. But I don't think it's beyond imagination for industries and prices to change dramatically based on this idea.

Verizon fucks us again

While there are certainly great things about my EnV3 phone and the service itself, there are many pitfalls of dealing with Verizon, and this is just the latest I've noticed.

So my phone has this really great camera right? Big hard drive space right? Comes with a USB cables that doubles as the power cable so it's real convenient right? Awesome! I think I'll go take a bunch of pictures, then upload them on my computer and bask in their glory on my gigantic monitor! Oh wait... YOU CAN'T! The only way to do it is to sift through the cryptic and vague list of device drivers for the one that allows your computer to read the fucking memory on the phone! It's like being locked in a room with a delicious piece of cake, but your hands are tied behind your back and your mouth is duct taped shut. If only you didn't have to pay someone a monthly fee to get your hands back.

This abuse of power by Verizon to give us 99% of what we need free with the phone, but then charge us an arm and a leg for the additional 1% that makes it all work makes me want to shoot a kitten in the face with a revolver. I'd rather go buy a brand new 3 megapixel digital camera that I can read the pictures directly off my phone than give them the satisfaction of bending over and taking it up the ass like they want me to. It's a damn shame that my statement will go completely unnoticed by them.

*sigh*

Cybernetics

Todays, white fiddling around with my EnV3 cellphone, I began to think about how in the not so distant future, the computing power of the average desktop will be crammed into somthing the size of a cell phone. Then, while watching a video series by DonExodus regarding evolution, I began to think about our contemporary evolutionary patterns.

Most of our current evolutions have had to do with societal evolutions, psychological evolutions, and technological evolutions. As DonExodus said, who I believe quoted someone before him, it is an organisms ability to adapt to change that causes it to pass its genetics on to the next generation; to breed. Since much of our contemporary adaptation comes from technology (air conditioning, pesticides, etc) it seems that an incorporation of our technological advancedments with our own evolutionary genetics would be the most beneficial for our immedeate evolution and/or survival in our environment. I am speaking of course of cybernetics. It seems likely that at a point we will adapt ourselves with the technology we create to form a symbiosis, and that eventually we will become so reliant and intertwined with technology that we will become one with it.

Bronze Age, industrial age, information age (our current era), robotics age, cybernetics age, quantum age, trancendance age. These would all seem to be logical projections of our species evolution, assuming something doesnt wipe us all out; ourselves or some natural phenomena. I just hope that we live long enough to see the evolution into an era where our technology combined with our mental processing powers can allow us to manipulate the subatomic world by the power of our physiological processes alone.

Zombie Music Video

OK, first of all you need to put on "Abysmal" by The Haunted, then imagine this progression of a music video. A corpse is laying in a coffin underground, and its eyes pop open. It begins to move, then as the drums and screaming come in, its hand reaches up through the earth grasping for the sky. Now among the world of the living, he begins walking out of the graveyard into the town. He keeps walking up to people on the street trying to terrify people, but nobody seems to pay him any attention, and seem to even see him as a joke. Confused, the zombie stumbles on. As he searches for people to terrify, he sees a homeless man being jeered at by some teens; a girl being kidnapped; he walks by a TV store and sees the news. On the news are pictures of genocides, atomic bombs, soldiers marching, children starving. Becoming overwhelmed by the horrors of our every day lives, he stumbles up into an abandoned apartment and in a desperate attempt to get away from our horrific lives, hangs himself, to return to the realm of death once more.

Sales: How I learned to Love the Idiot

Customers are stupid; its just a fact of life. If you work for tech support, each mindless moron who forgets to plug the computer into the wall is like being stabbed in the face with a branding iron. Or if you work in say, the car rental industry, trying to explain the complexities of why we require the customer to give us some meager collateral for a 30,000 dollar car can make you want to do some face stabbing of your own.

But the sad fact of life is that at one point or another, we are all the ignorant consumer. We are all idiots when it comes to things that we don't immerse ourselves in regularly, and while it's easy to call the next guy in line a moron for not reading his contract before signing, it's just as easy for me to look stupid when I don't know what size suit I wear, or what features I need to look for in a lawnmower.

So I've been trying to learn to empathize better with customers. Really honestly empathize, not just understand what they are saying, and it's actually rather eye opening. I can imagine the feeling of unknowing for someone who doesn't know a thing about what I'm selling, and meet them on a level thats comfortable to them and can help them through a possibly unwanted sales situation in the first place. That's ultimately what sales comes down to; the relationship between the seller and the consumer. When i'm able to actually put myself in their shoes (which isn't always... yet), I can see them get more relaxed, they invariably buy more, it makes me have more fun at work, and we both leave the transaction smiling.

Empathy is a wierd thing when it really works, but it's also really cool to see what happens when we put ourselves in a different perspective. Just to end on a sappy moralistic note, if everone on earth could learn to love the idiots in their lives, I'd bet good money the world would be a much happier place in general.

Megadeth

There is no real point to this blog other than to illustrate the point that Megadeth and Photoshop are awesome. The basic text framework is free from the Megadeth band website and I added my own personal touch to it. I also added a few versions with different colors for shits and giggles.