Rico Penguin

  While I imagine absolutely anyone reading this already knows I thought it was a fascinating tidbit to point out just how destructive petty prejudices can be. Case in point with the ever vocal homophobes in our country (which is beyond me, I don’t see what homosexuality has to do with anyone outside of those who are homosexual).

  For whatever reason a vast amount of the Arabic translators in the US military are (or I suppose I should say were) homosexual. Prior to the 9/11 attack the US intelligence agencies had received plenty of non translated material that all told could have quite easily raised our chances of preventing the attack to levels that are almost disgusting. Indeed even now the US has mounds of Arabic material that has either been poorly translated or not translated at all because they got rid of all the men and women who were willing to put their lives on the line for a military so prejudice that it would kick them out for something as unrelated as their sexuality.

  So what is the cost of Homophobia? 2,740. That’s how many people that died in the 9/11 terrorist attack, that’s almost three thousand people who likely all would have much as many talented people working in the military and intelligence agencies as possible. Not only this but the aftermath of the event has cost the lives of thousands more US soldiers, I’m pretty sure a few dozen reporters, and that doesn’t even count all the people who have died in Afghanistan and Iraq that aren’t related to these organizations that have died in the cross fire or shrapnel. Likewise the war itself could have been avoided (since its very hard to invade a nation if you aren’t already at war or have good reason to get going there).

  So the next time you see two men holding hands, or two women hugging and kissing before going about their day, and you feel a sickness in your stomach try to remember that that feeling cost the lives of thousands of people and for what? Because of some dark disgusting misinformed preconceptions you have about homosexuals? I hate to sound overly passionate about the topic because it might take away from my point but I am hard pressed to understand.

  People might think that prejudices are harmless when not directly hurting people, but in the end they cost the lives of far more people. It only takes a little nationally supported prejudice to cost the lives of tens of millions of people. Few people deserve to die and even that is questionable, in the end it is never the fault of one person for the actions of that one person, there are many variables that come into a strong collaborative image to make each and every one of us. However you can be certain in a country of dissension and judgmentalism, you will generate many many people who are destined for an early death.

Notes:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0DE1DD1038F933A15752C0A9639C8B63 – 2005 Article on the topic, there are literally 10’s of thousands of them on the internet. Have an adventure and go google surfing, it’s an enlightening endeavor sometimes.

  It’s a hard pill to swallow for some people. Which is not entirely difficult to understand considering the massive swaths of money spent every single year on the drug war and anti drug advertising + education. Most evidence seems to show that these tactics are not only ineffective but highly counter productive.

  Legalized Heroin has been popping up in a few countries around the world, as far as I know the results have been the same. For the exception of foreigners entering attempting to snag some drugs without fear of prosecution it has been an overall success. The amount of people on heroin drops with this program, the amount of people picking up the substance drops, and the amount of crime related to the use of the substance tanks. It’s obvious as well, there are a few things that are required for a drug to be popular or widely used. Firstly you require a condition in which consumption of the drug is more positive than other activities and secondly you require some form of mass advertising. Now some people might be curious as to what sort of advertisement drugs like Marijuana get that would be making them so popular in places like the US (which has tens of millions of people actively using the substance).

  Word of mouth is the name of the game with illegal drugs. A combination of users and anti-drug advertisers, its difficult to not think about drugs in a society that is so blatantly obsessed with them. It doesn’t help that most advertising is sensationalist and highly misinformed, which does nothing to raise confidence about the negative repercussions. The natural response for humans (and I imagine any animal if we could speak to them) when told that they are not allowed to do something without proper information on the reasoning is to try that activity. I’m not entirely sure the reasoning behind it but I’m hardly devoid of the allure.

  That said I don’t do (conventional) drugs and it has nothing to do with the morality of it, I am a strong believer that morality is a painfully ambiguous concept that is masqueraded as a reasonable way to lead ones life. If anything in this universe should be shot it would be Morality. That aside I don’t do drugs for the biological reasons, I’m already very weird as is and frankly already have a brain full of thoughts that keeps me going. I am a huge fan of working organs and want to milk every last second I can out of my life.

  I say conventional because many people use drugs, if you have downed anything with Sugar in it you are using a highly addictive substance with mind altering properties. Sugar is even related to many terrible terrible diseases, obesity and diabetes being two pretty popular outcomes. If you’ve ever ingested caffeine or taken anything for headaches and the likes. But for whatever unusual reason these things are all ok, yes I realize that Sugar is required in certain doses to survive so save those comments for someone else .

  There is an unusual assumption that drugs leads to crime, it’s something of a self fulfilling outcome that has to do with the nature of our reaction to drugs. In most cases the substance is legal for quite a while, it gains a sizeable following and begins to impose upon more popular drugs like alcohol and tobacco. A large lobbying project is enacted and the substances are made illegal, now you have a large group of people who went from simply enjoying themselves to being criminals. Likewise instead of getting ‘treated’ when they are caught they are put in jail or fined, they lose their jobs, and in many cases end up losing much more. Nothing that they lose is related to the drug but instead the (very hypocritical) reaction towards the use of the substance.

  Even the arguments against illegal drugs is flawed, Marijuana is consistently discussed as the ‘gateway’ drug yet every study I’ve ever read showed that most Marijuana smokers had initially tried Cigarettes and found that Marijuana had better side effects with less noticeable negative side effects (It’s difficult to vomit off a joint but very easy on your first cigarette). Likewise correlating the deaths related to the substance to its harmfulness falls through. The deaths related to illegal substances have to do with the nature of supply and demand with illegal activities, generally the demand is high because of the dark mysterious nature of the item and the supply is low because of the nature of criminal activity which generates HUGE sums of cash (which is lucrative).

  The Harrison act was supposedly going to create this fancy new US where there were no drugs and everyone cuddled bears. Well what it did end up doing was (much like prohibition) was create a multitude of crime syndicates, if you are looking for someone to thank for the massive power of gangs and nations like Colombia, look no further than the US’s prohibition on drugs. The amount of money you can make from dealing drugs is preposterous. Legal drug companies know this too and that is why pharmaceuticals are so powerful in the government.

  However when you look at Tobacco and Alcohol it is literally a case of the substance being harmful. Which is where the irony comes in, two of the most efficient ways of killing people (or at least causing pretty impressive amounts of biological damage) are the two that are legal. It goes back to the experimental neurosis and the unusual effect this sort of hypocrisy has on the trust and reaction of the people to their government.

  There are plenty of dangerous things that people can do that are legal, like sky diving, spanking gorillas, juggling knives, drinking the water in Mexico, saying anything negative about any non-white person, or shooting of fireworks while hammered during the appropriate holiday. While some of these are in jest I find it difficult to argue that most are less dangerous than most (if not all) illegal substances. If you don’t believe me make a video of yourself slapping a gorilla on the ass and live to tell about it.

  Most drugs are not shiny nor are they rare, which means that they do not have an intrinsic value. The entirety of their worth comes from the militant nature of our laws against them, likewise the higher their worth the more dangerous activities involving them become. Drugs themselves are not inherently bad, we have to work very hard to make them dangerous and to make them popular.

  In a closing thought I find it funny that one of the world’s largest faiths is built off of a story of a man ‘hearing things’ after being near a ‘burning bush’ yet we try to take a morale high ground on drugs. What do you think that bush was?

  As I sit here realizing that it would cost me 100 dollars to recover my corrupt one note files, I feel that (time permitting) that it may at least be good for the topic of determinism (Note: Time was not permitting). Otherwise its an incredibly crushing experience that gives me a very negative view of Microsoft at the moment (which is a shame because Windows 7 had peaked my interest in them). So to anyone out there make backups of your one notes, there is NO way to recover them (as far as I know) without paying some random asshole 100 dollars. May sound hard but charging that much for file recover is preposterous.

  So without further delay:

Determinism: Every event that occurs is completely determined by previous conditions.

E is physically necessary =df E is required by the laws of nature.

E is completely determined by previous conditions =df the combination of previous events and the laws of nature makes e physically necessary.

  Now this is important information. For those that do not know =df means "if by definition", likewise if you’ve seen it before iff means if and only if. E is simply a variable much like *.

  The idea is that our history is a singular line, each event directed by the previous event which is also governed by its previous event traveling all the way back to the big bang (be that for you a cosmic blast or just some deity doing the ole bang solo). In essence it says that all actions have been predetermined by events that happened even before the agents of those actions were alive.

  It goes so far for some as to say that because we cannot control our actions (and instead are merely reacting) that we should not be responsible for those actions. It has caused a few thoughts to spark in my head that make it a very sketchy system.

  The second is an example of the life of a simple system. In the beginning it’s as simple as a coin toss, then in this particular case it becomes a 3 way outcome. However if we look back historically the actions of this organism would look like the above line because there would be only one outcome to every one of the actions.

  Essentially Determinism says that because natural law is unable to make decisions and must act directly with the world around it that living organisms act entirely in the same way. However essentially determinism says the following.

If every single variable in the past happened exactly in the same way the exact same history would transpire.

  This explains everything and in the same manner states nothing (a very popular tactic in philosophy). When an organism is born the actions it makes are at the simplest level a coin toss between two possibilities, the response is so quick to the outside viewer that it can be mistaken for a mere reaction to the environment not unlike how the waves move with the turning of the Earth, the gravitation of the moon and other bodies, as well as the shear orgy of shoving between the forces in the sea. In fact random functions like coin tosses aren’t even negated in the universe of determinism. Because if the coin was tossed with the exact same force, from the exact same point, with the exact same wind resistance, the exact same gravitational pull, landing exactly on the same spot on a surface that is in the exact same condition as the first attempt, and all other variables I cannot even fathom being exactly the same then the results would be exactly the same. However this requires a universal knowledge (omniscience I think its called) for it to be a form of understanding that has any purpose in life.

  Even the previous example explained by determinism breaks down when rendered on a PC. If you created a simple program to flip a coin (return the result of 0 or 1 with a 50% chance) you would receive results each time that are completely separate from the results of the former. In theory if you were to rewind time you would get a different set of results each time that you did it (assuming you did it 10-20 times). This is because the forces acting upon the results in the digital realm are not a result of the outside world and thusly would not be held down by the rules of determinism.

  There are many different forms of determinism, some harsher than the one I’ve described and some weaker. However in all cases it appears that determinism is very weak. Organisms much like Personal Computers take in information, run it through a series of scripts (or a script if its a really small program on a PC >_>), this is a process that nothing else in the universe does (to my knowledge). There is a point where the outside senses of an organism does indeed directly influence it to a point that trumps the looping processes, but that appears to only be in instances of errors. If you place a person in a room that’s twelve times their body temperature you will find a direct influence on their activities (producing a small set of responses), however if you place someone in a room that is .12 percent warmer than their body you will find a multitude of responses. However in either case when you look back it will only look like a straight line.

  It is impossible for history to have more than one result when looking back, philosophy aside, it wouldn’t make any form of sense to expect anything else but single incidents in history. One of the simplest forms of logic known as modal logic says (essentially) the following:

If X can exist without Y then X is not identical to Y.

  What this essentially says is that you cannot logically exist and not exist at the exact same time. Likewise in history an event cannot happen and not happen. This means that in history even if an event had 90 trillion possible outcomes, there can only be one to have happened, and I feel this is something that even a child grasps. Which is what bothers me about Determinism. It essentially says that since history only happened in one way then all of time has only one possible outcome. This seems like quite a bold statement, it would be like me saying that if I ran a program to flip a coin and it returned heads, that in all cases in the future I’d see heads. It seems foolish to take an obvious property of history and attempt to use it to explain the future.

  I’d have dipped more into this but spending 5 hours attempting to recover my notes has all but crushed my writing spirit… Goodnight all . I should be more chipper next update.

  Three daily college realities have seemingly overlooked the age old idea of Common Courtesy, do unto others as you would wish them to do unto you (albeit flawed that logic works pretty well most times).

  
(Image from Slate)

  Spitting is an activity that I’m quite certain has been around since the very first organisms blessed with the ability to do so. Likewise I feel that in some situations it is a very important activity that may indeed save you from certain death (I’ll let your imagination go wild with that). However I find this incessant equation of spitting = cool to be getting out of hand. I have four classes that I walk between every other day, which equates to 3 walks of roughly 5-10 minutes in duration. On each of these walks I see at least two dozen glossy splatters of mucous on the ground. If the wind catches it you’ll even see people walking with snot slathered on their shoes.

  This is ridiculous. If you can’t make a walk between your classes without spitting you need to get help. If you can’t make it through a day without spitting you should acquire medical attention this instant. “But it’s gross to swallow spit.” It’s produced in your mouth and frankly spitting and swallowing cause it to cross nearly the same amount of taste spots on your tongue. It’s bad enough that people can’t make it to a trash can without dropping their gum on the ground we don’t need to add piles of disease everywhere.

  Oh you didn’t realize that? Whenever you spit you aren’t simply safely discarding of germs from your system. When other people step on it they carry that disease into their home, into classrooms, dining areas, and even into hospitals (yeah thanks). Tuberculosis and similar diseases are spread quite consistently by spitting, whenever the spit dries the germs are carried through the air, so next time you see a beautiful windy day take a gander at all the dried flem on the ground. What used to be camping out on it is likely dancing around in your lungs.

  This is one of the three activities that I’m forced to examine with each school day that is disgusting in every meaning of the word.

  
(Image from winston.hoyhouse (Site not linked because of virus attempt))

  Smoking while you walk in a crowded area. I have nothing against smoking as a personal activity, frankly I’m in full support of any drug habit you feel isn’t destroying your life (someday I’ll write an article on that view to help flesh it out) but this is different. There are a few common courtesies that I give to all people that are anywhere in my vicinity, I don’t press their face up against my ass and fart, I don’t pee on anyone, and I don’t carry a campfire with me to blanket all those around me with smoke.

  It doesn’t matter what you smoke, be it tobacco, weed, or a chimpanzee, if it’s smoking it’s not good for your lungs. In almost all cases your lungs hate when solid particles are caking inside of them, regardless of it those particles are literally Costco cake particles or crystallized chunks of toxins. Likewise standing a foot away from me doesn’t magically make the smoke not come my way, many times while waiting at bus stops there is a small group of people chain smoking about three to five feet away from the stop that has a prominent “No Smoking” sign on it. I find it an odd paradigm that you can’t drink alcohol in public yet you can smoke. Of the two I prefer the obnoxious drunks behavior to the coal train walking in front of me.

  I know in the same breath most people can say its not addictive and ignore the fact they can’t make it through a school day without smoking and frankly that’s not what this post is about. If you can find a way to smoke without me having to inhale your leftovers we have no conflict. Otherwise stop smoking when you are in public, even propaganda aside that is not in the slightest way courteous. Unless we can agree that I can fart directly in your face without recourse. Then I think we have a deal (keep in mind when I have pot stickers you may not survive the incident).

(Image from yorkblog)

  This falls back to the last conversation of smoking. I really don’t feel there is anything wrong with texting, it’s a form of communication and I feel that’s a wonderful thing. But much like smoking it has its place. That place is not in a classroom. I am driven to a near homicidal rage when I find the student behind me, the student two kids to the left of me, and the student directly to the right of me all texting. The clicking becomes this haunting orchestra that distracts me and leaves much of the class discussion collapsing beneath its weight.

  You are not that important, people CAN survive without you for 50 minutes (much like I feel you can survive without a cigarette when in crowded areas). I don’t have my cell phone on when I am in class, because I understand two major things. I don’t NEED to be available at all times of the day, I’m not the president nor am I the pope. Secondly I am not the only person in the classroom. Much like smoking in the middle of 100 non-smokers is an obvious dick move you should not be clicking away at a tiny keyboard in a course that cost everyone in the class hundreds of dollars.

  If you don’t feel the lectures are worth your attention then stop coming to class. If you can’t survive without discussing things with your BFF then start taking all the same courses. This is unacceptable in almost all situations. The only time I feel that you should be texting in class involves situations that warrant you not being there in the first place. This problem is absolutely out of control at my university and one of the major players in my inability to suggest anyone ever attend this place.

  There are likely other things but in my daily life these three are rampant. In the last year I have never had a day where I wasn’t dodging smoke clouds, mucous mounds, or attempting to ignore the endless clicking of gossipy texters. If these situations had been played out in a book I’d feel they were exaggerative but this is everyday life at Western.

  I have no plans to have rants all the time, these are just some things that are going to cause me to lose years off my life (from stress and disease which each feed off one another) or cause me to end someone elses life early .