by Pappy November 23rd, 2009 ,  Posted in: Religion , Science , evolution

Imagine this:

You are a member of the Fore tribe in Papua New Guinea, living in relatively small tribal and family groups. Your beloved Uncle has died and you are preparing to take part in a traditional funeral ritual to honor him. As part of the ritual, Uncle’s brains are ceremonially eaten by you and your family; it is a mark of respect.

The event is repeated through the years as other family members die. Some time later, many of your neighbors and even some of your own family members begin dying off rapidly. Even though your people wont eat anyone known to be diseased, the death rate spirals upwards. But not you, nor any of your children. You still continue the traditional practice of eating human brains, and see no negative effects at all. You have no idea that a brain wasting disease, called kuru, is sweeping through your culture. You have no idea that your genes protect you against kuru and have been passed on to your descendants. You may be clueless, but you are an evolved human.

Similar to mad cow disease, kuru is spread through the consumption of infected brains. It spread its way through the Fore tribe, killing at least 2500 members in the twentieth century until its cause was discovered in the 1960s, and the brain-eating practice was finally abandoned. At it’s height, between 1957 and 1968, over 1100 members of the South Fore, mostly women, died of kuru. At one point, there were almost no women remaining in some Fore territories.

Kuru is taken from the Fore word “kuria/guria”, ‘to shake’. It is also known as the laughing sickness due to the pathologic bursts of laughter people would display when afflicted with the disease.

This amazing tale is true, and this week scientists have revealed the even more amazing details behind the discovery. Let’s break down the specifics, released by Simon Mead of the British prion research center at University College London:

• Mead and colleagues discovered a mutated gene after comparing the stored DNA of 152 Fore kuru victims with over 3000 living Fore members, including nearly 600 who participated in the brain eating practice.
• In 51 survivors they discovered a variant of PRNP, the gene that makes prions, which are the proteins that spread the disease.
• The change in the gene comes at a position called codon 127. Throughout the animal kingdom, the codon contains the same amino acid, called glycine or “G”, from each parent, giving the form G127G. To their astonishment, Mead and his colleagues found a variant of the codon never seen in nature before, in which one of the glycines has been swapped for a valine amino acid, giving the new variant the name G127V.
• The mutation first arose about 200 years ago by accident in a single individual, who then passed it down to his or her descendants, and so on to today’s generation, who still carry the gene.
• It was a very sudden genetic change under intense selection pressure from the disease.

It comes as no surprise that, just as Darwin showed evolution to occur in the Galapagos, the transition arose and took root in an isolated human population with almost no genetic transfer with the outside world. As if the DNA weren’t proof enough, the mechanisms and conditions under which evolution operates are further demonstrated in this instance as well. This is indeed a very specific and demonstrable case of human evolution, observed almost literally as it happened.

As Mead stated in his release, “I hope it will become a textbook example of how evolution happens. It’s a striking and timely example, given the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species,” he says.

Finally, in keeping with my recent campaign, ol’ Pappy has to poke a dead dog in the eye for no other reason than to watch the twitchy, nervous response that corpses sometimes exhibit when properly agitated. I propose the following conundrum to our religious faithful who will insist this proves nothing:

If this is NOT proof of evolution in humans, then the Fore, and only the Fore people, were granted this genetic miracle by God. As the gene protects the practitioners of cannibalism, doesn’t God therefore condone or even encourage the practice? Does this finally prove that the practice of communion has it’s origins in cannibalism like some of us have been suggesting all along? Does God not love the rest of us enough to bless us as well, given the G127V variant may also protect humans from other prion diseases? And if God created the miracle, then which God? The entire kuru epidemic, the resulting genetic mutation, and the abandonment of cannibalism all happened prior to any exposure to, or influence from, the so-called “true” religions of christianity, judaism, or islam.

Did I say I was only going to poke it once?

Pappy out.

• Tags: evolution, Fore, G127V, Papua New Guinea
• Comments(0)

by Pappy November 22nd, 2009 ,  Posted in: Atheism , Religion

One of the most annoying statements religious people make about atheists is that, without belief in a god or gods, an atheist is without moral character. Sometimes the statements are quite wild, such as “You’re an atheist? You must not have any problems with stealing or even killing then, right?”

Just to set the record straight, then, I give you the results of the following study. Given our (atheist)  relative percentage of the general population, it appears that a religious person is about 100 times more likely to commit a crime that will land them in prison. Either that or we’re just too smart to get caught. Either way, I’m okay with the results…

STUDIES: ATHEISTS SUPPLY LESS THAN 1% OF PRISON POPULATIONS

by Wayne Aiken, North Carolina Director

AMERICAN ATHEISTS

In “The New Criminology,” Max D. Schlapp and Edward E. Smith say that two generations of statisticians found that the ratio of convicts without religious training is about 1/10th of 1%. W.T. Root, Professor of Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, examined 1,916 prisoners and said, “Indifference to religion, due to thought, strengthens character,” adding that Unitarians, Agnostics, Atheists and Free-Thinkers were absent from penitentiaries, or nearly so.

During 10 years in Sing-Sing, of those executed for murder 65% were Catholics, 26% Protestants, 6% Hebrew, 2% Pagan, and less than 1/3 of 1% non-religious.

Steiner and Swancara surveyed Canadian prisons and found 1,294 Catholics, 435 Anglicans, 241 Methodists, 135 Baptists, and 1 Unitarian.

Dr. Christian, Superintendent of the N.Y. State Reformatories, checked records of 22,000 prison inmates and found only 4 college graduates. In “Who’s Who,” 91% were college graduates; Christian commented that “intelligence and knowledge produce right living,” and, “crime is the offspring of superstition and ignorance.”

Surveyed Massachusetts reformatories found every inmate to be religious.

In Joliet Prison, there were 2,888 Catholics, 1,020 Baptists, 617 Methodists and no prisoners identified as non-religious.

Michigan had 82,000 Baptists and 83,000 Jews in the state population; but in the prisons, there were 22 times as many Baptists as Jews, and 18 times as many Methodists as Jews. In Sing-Sing, there were 1,553 inmates, 855 of them (over half) Catholics, 518 Protestants, 117 Jews, and 8 non-religious.

Steiner first surveyed 27 states and found 19,400 Christians, 5,000 with no preference and only 3 Agnostics (one each in Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Illinois). A later, more exhaustive survey found 60,605 Christians, 5,000 Jews, 131 Pagans, 4,000 “no preference,” and only 3 Agnostics.

In one 19-state survey, Steiner found 15 non-believers, Spiritualists, Theosophists, Deists, Pantheists and 1 Agnostic among nearly 83,000 inmates. He labeled all 15 as “anti-christians.” The Elmira, N.Y. reformatory system overshadowed all others, with nearly 31,000 inmates, including 15,694 Catholics (half) and 10,968 Protestants, 4,000 Jews, 325 refusing to answer, and 0 unbelievers.

In the East, over 64% of inmates are Roman Catholic. Throughout the national prison population, they average 50%. A national census of the general population found Catholics to be about 15% (and they count from the diaper up). Hardly 12% are old enough to commit a crime, and half of these are women. That leaves an adult Catholic population of 6% supplying 50% of the prison population.

On my, oh my! No sooner did I post this (literally!) I received an email stating these numbers didn’t make sense. So, in the interest of educating the mindless religoids, here they are simplified:

I think that’s enough education. Should you (you know who you are, M.D.) need more, buy the Video Professor’s DVD on MS Excel and plug the rest of the numbers in yourself. I know, I know, that’s math, and math is a science, and science is BIG WOOLY BAD in the religio-fantasy world, but them’s the facts.

Pappy out.

• Comments(0)

by Pappy September 15th, 2009 ,  Posted in: Business , Futurism , Sustainability , Technology

Few people in today’s technological age have not yet heard of Moore’s Law. Since the earliest computers of the 1940s, computing power has grown exponentially, and along with that capability has come explosive economic growth. In 1971, the CPU was introduced, containing 2,300 transistors. Moore’s Law essentially says that the number of transistors that can be contained on a silicon wafer will double every 18-24 months. This in turn doubles the capabilities of what we can accomplish with our computers, and much of THAT is the driving force behind sustaining the economic engine the modern world relies on. Without continued growth our free market economies do not just stagnate; they collapse.

By 1990, transistor counts surpassed one million.

By 2000, they had soared beyond 10,000,000.

In 2008, they exceeded 2 billion.

But, Moore’s Law is not infinite. Each new doubling of computing power comes through our ability to shrink the transistor to smaller and smaller scales, and by reducing (or at least better controlling) the heat these miniature dynamos generate. We currently operate at or around the 90 nanometer scale, but because of an effect know as “quantum tunneling” we can shrink no more than to the 16 nanometer scale. Anything smaller will require a shift to quantum computers: technology that does not yet exist, and because of the nature of quantum physics, may never exist.

What exactly makes this so important to our economic engines? Since the 1970s there has been a massive shift in 1st world countries from materials and industrial based economics, to information based economies. In an information economy, information providers must continue to offer more storage, fatter pipelines, improved data analysis, fast processing, and more advanced software capabilities, and they must do so while keeping consumer costs as low as possible to ensure a broad customer base. Failure to do so typically results in the rapid atrophy as they are soon replaced by companies who can do it faster, better, smaller, and cheaper. The information industry uses Moore’s Law to plan ahead and drive their markets.

There are differing estimates as to how long Moore’s Law will last, but without the invention of entirely new technologies there is a strong likelihood that we will slam into it’s upper limits sometime between 2015 and 2025. It’s a gamble to assume those new technologies will materialize, so what do we do?

Some say we need to return to being a primarily industrial producer. But let’s look at the realities of that. The United States simply cannot compete with China and India’s raw labor pools. At least not without completely abandoning the concepts of minimum wage, labor unions, employer provided benefits, and workplace safety standards. Even were we to do so, the issue of raw materials needed for industrialization is problematic: few of these resources are sustainable and competition to acquire them will only become more fierce as they dwindle. Without an affluent consumer base to buy our glut of cheap products dumped onto world markets, what good will it do us anyway? Presently U.S. citizens are by far the most affluent in the world. We inhale raw materials in the form of cheap, disposable Asian products, and there is nobody waiting in the wings to fulfill that role in the world economy should we abandon it to return to being a producer nation.

But therein lies an even deeper dilemma.  Our consumerism is no more sustainable than the industrialization that feeds it. The economic woes of the last 2 years attest to this. We purchased beyond our means, borrowed far beyond our ability to repay, risked our wealth recklessly with an assumption there would be a continuing flow of more behind it to cover the risk. The saddest part of this is that it was almost all entirely based on the need for self satisfaction through what we possess. We seem to be able to ignore our own needs, as long as we can fulfill our wants, conveniences, and creature comforts.

Consumerism boils down to greed in the long run. A viral, hollow, unsatisfying greed that is spreading as emerging free market economies increasingly push towards American style affluence as their goals. That push will lead to even more competition for resources, and an eventual collapse so stupendous it will make the recent world economic crisis look like a 2 minute movie trailer.

After Moore’s Law.

So what, then, can see us beyond the walls of Moore’s Law?

There simply is no single, short-term answer. No silver bullet government program can change the course we’re now on. As individuals we must change the way we think. We have to significantly reduce our demands on the world, it’s resources, and our governments. That shift needs to be focused on increasing our demands and expectations of ourselves. The shift to a sustainable world economy can only come as an evolutionary force - it cannot be mandated from the outside.

Evolution always occurs at the smallest scales and then grows. In terms of social evolution that scale begins with us, individually. The types of changes I’m talking about are no different that what you hear being talked about already. Spend less. Find satisfaction in living, in family, instead of work and materialism. Start a backyard or rooftop garden with a goal of producing n% of your own food. Recycle. Buy local. Barter. Learn how to build it or repair it yourself. Turn off the TV and the light switches. Prepare for disaster so you can rescue yourself and your neighbors. Find your sense of community again.

As more and more of us learn to become self-sustaining again, those ways will become part of a larger organism; a community. Communities will merge and coalesce to become something even greater. New (or old, depending on how you look at it) economies will form. Viable models will succeed by the laws of cooperative evolution. But only if we can first change the very nature of how we look at ourselves at the individual level.

The Darker Side.

Anyone who knows me well will tell you I’m equal parts optimist and pessimist. I believe wholeheartedly in the dynamic of the human mind. We are so incredibly resilient. Any study of human history will show you we, as a species, can overcome almost any obstacle, at seemingly insurmountable odds. But we are also our own worst enemy. We have a tendency to let others do our thinking for us - to choose a course or leader and blindly follow it to our own individual destruction. As individuals we are often weak-willed and easily led. It’s too easy to become caught up in emotions and political rivalries. Some of humanity’s oldest problems are still with us today, only because of these traits.

I say this because, with the daunting future in front of us, I believe too few individuals will ultimately make the necessary choices in order to affect the needed social evolution of our species. That does not mean that those that recognize the need should not continue to strive for such an idealistic outcome.  But be forewarned that at some point in the future the time will come to choose, and to make the strong choice will not be easy at all.

If the world economy hits Moore’s Law and begins to crumble, there will be a revival in converts. Without the consumer economy to provide for them they will look to sustainability en masse, but too late. One cannot evolve ones self on demand overnight, or simply by following the crowd, and without internal change at the individual level they will mostly fail.

Those who prepared, who tried to be the prophets in the wilderness, will by necessity have to step aside and allow this to happen. Almost every great leap in human evolution was proceeded by a calamitous event. Repeated ice ages where human populations fell to near extinction. Wars, famines, and diseases that destroyed entire cultures. Those that  remained after these events, however, almost always experienced a period of explosive advancement and social evolution that improved the species afterwards. There are no good reasons to believe this will not be the case in the future.

Anyone that can see it coming enough to prepare as best they can should be ready to embrace that new future and shape it for the betterment of all humanity.

So. Keep your hope and faith in humanity alive. Strive to be one that’s ready to build a sustainable world by being a sustainable individual. Simply live, live simply, and leave simple minds to whatever future they create for themselves.

• Comments(0)

by Pappy February 12th, 2009 ,  Posted in: Science

Happy Darwin Day!

What is Darwin Day? Darwin Day is a global celebration of science and reason held on or around February 12th each year. Named after evolutionary biologist, Charles Darwin, this year is an especially bright Darwin Day, as it’s the 200th anniversary  of Mr. Darwin’s birth.

Personally, I owe a great deal to Charles Darwin. I was raised first in a conservative Church of Christ environment, and then later we transitioned into non-denominational “fundamentalist” christianity; that is to say the form of belief that defines you as a person, and tears you down if you are found lacking when comparing your own life to the dogmas of “Truth without Proof”.

By the time I was 26 I’d found the church just didn’t fit into my experiences in the real world any longer: I was caught in an un-winnable war between immovable faith and the realities of daily life. When a person raised in the faith reaches this kind of impasse, at the very core you will almost always find the subject of Creation. If God created the Earth, then surely he is the center of your own being and reason for existing. Questioning one always leads you to question the other.

At the point I finally confirmed to myself I no longer believed in God or any of the tenets of christianity it had been such a part of my life that I felt empty and angry. Life with God had become hypocrisy, but life without him was incomplete. My wonderful wife finally kicked me in the ass and said “You know what you don’t believe anymore, so go out and find what you DO believe.”

Darwin’s incredible descriptions of his uncovery of evolution were the starting point that eventually led me to my own “Truths”. Here were words I could not only read and understand, but that were observable in the real world as well. Each new scientific discovery since then seems to only further confirm the relevance and accuracy of Darwin’s evolution, in turn confirming my own place in life. Darwin found the Mechanism of life, freeing me from a need for a Source.

Another evolutionary scientist that shaped the next stage of self discovery for me was the controversial figure John Stewart, of the Free University of Brussells. In his seminal work, Evolution’s Arrow, he postulated that evolution was not just the result of random changes that succeeded, but rather it followed a course. Not a course layed down by deities or beings from space, but a course whereby cooperative changes would always be more successful than uncooperative.

Stewart suffered significant ridicule from the “in crowd” of evolutionists like the late Stephen Gould who insist that the Mechanism of evolution is made up of pure chaos and does not favor any one change over another. In many ways, these believers represent the mentality of only having a single way to interpret science more typical of religious scholars. For me at least, however, Stewart’s interpretation of evolution as being cooperative in nature speaks true on every level, be it biological or social.

The Mechanism of evolution is the “staged development of progressive changes leading to new forms of organization”.

The Energy that powers the Mechanism is “cooperation at greater and greater scale”.

The final mental leap that has brought me to where I am today came as I finally reached the point where my new found beliefs became as ingrained and natural to me as my christian brainwashing had been. Believe it or not this became manifest mostly due to the requirements of my job as a software systems architect.

I’m often called upon to analyze and then find solutions for business problems. The first step is of course to see how things are currently done and define which processes work and which ones don’t. Once this is done, it’s normally quite easy to see where current processes need to “evolve” to better meet the business need. Defining how to structure and implement that evolution is where the “ah hah” realization comes in.

If you use cooperative evolution as a basis, then defining how to build the better fruit fly, mouse-trap, or software system is universal:

1. Identify the parts
2. Organize them based on their roles within the whole
3. Identify interaction between the roles
4. Segregate interactions that require cooperation between the parts
5. Define the responsible part for coordinating the cooperation
6. Rinse and repeat steps 1-5 until all interactions between all roles have been completely mapped out
7. Consider how this system integrates with other systems
8. Integrations are only larger parts of a larger whole system, so repeat all previous steps at the next greater scale

Viola! When finished, you have achieved the “staged development of progressive changes, forming a new level of organization based around controlled cooperation at increasing scales of complexity.” I call this process Systemic Thought, but when you look at it closely it is just cooperative evolution by design.

I’ve used this Systemic Thought process to solve communication problems between myself and my daughter’s elementary school teachers, and to find and fix fraudulent marketing promotions costing the company hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. It has now become such a universal way of thinking for me that I couldn’t “unplug” from it if I wanted to.

All my gratitude to you, Mr. Charles Darwin, not for teaching us the mechanics of evolution, but for teaching us that we can evolve the way we think, and thereby evolve ourselves. Happy Birthday.

• Tags: Darwin, evolution, systems, thought
• Comments(0)

by Pappy May 5th, 2008 ,  Posted in: Life

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here, but not because I haven’t been busy. In fact, just the opposite is true. I’ve been developing several new, open-source PHP classes: the first, called awfDialog, was nominated for the PHP Innovation Award at PHPClasses.Org. I didn’t win, but did take 4th place with 14% of the vote. The second, not yet publicly released, called awfRadial, is in testing to be used first on one of my clients’ websites.

On top of that, I’ve been learning to use several new graphics programs to which I’ve become addicted. Check out the code and art at my TestLab site.

On the writing front, I’ve been toying with the idea for a story that I think may best be realized as a campaign setting for the Spycraft RPG system. I haven’t played table-top RPGs since I was in junior-high, but close friends have kept me up to date with the scene, and I think the story may well work best as something to be played instead of read directly. The general concept I call “The Sundowner” series. In a nutshell, there is a secretive corporate that is planning on a global take-over, fueled by destroying the world’s current energy driven economy, to be replaced with “free” energy provided by the consortium. It is a deep-seated multinational conspiracy, weaving in and out of numerous industries and across every part of the globe.

If I do develop this as a game module, players will have to uncover clues across many adventure missions in order to untangle the conspiracy and stop the corporate barons before they succeed in toppling the modern society as we know it. The plot is straight out of today’s headlines: fossil fuels based economies struggling to deal with increasing demand and diminishing supplies, environmental devastation caused by the effects of global warming, corporate espionage and terrorism, and the introduction of bio-medical, computer interface technologies.

That’s it for now. Just wanted the world to know Pappy hadn’t disappeared…

• Tags: art, awfDialog, awfRadial, game, graphics, RPG, Sundowner
• Comments(0)

by Pappy November 3rd, 2007 ,  Posted in: History , Religion , World

Who hasn’t heard of the Salem witch trials of 1692? Nineteen men and women, including the town’s Puritan minister, were hanged on Gallows Hill for their participation in witchcraft. Another man was crushed under stone blocks for refusing to submit to trial. Hundreds of others languished in jail under accusations while this madness carried on for almost a year.

A group of teenage girls, for still unknown reasons, began the hysteria by accusing several older women of bewitching them, sending their witch’s familiars to oppress, threaten, and pinch the girls. Preposterous, eh? The real scary part really begins with the town’s response to these teenage pranks. The accused were dragged in for trial. No evidence other than the girls’ testimony was required. The court did consider “spectral evidence”, although that was again mostly claims by victims.

Every time one of the women spoke of their piety, their goodness, or denied the charges, the girls would go into crazed fits, writhing and screaming on the floor. At one point, when Rebbecca Nurse was found innocent by the jury, the girls went into a frenzy. The judge asked the jury to consider this response of evil, and they changed their verdict. Amazingly, order was immediately restored in the court. On July 19th, 1692 she was hanged alongside four other innocent women.

Even though many of the girls admitted they had lied, the executions went on from June until September.

As quickly as it began, it was over. Massachusetts was in shock and the entire region was still dealing with and rationalizing the tragedy almost a decade later. But it was over.

Fast forward now to the 21st century. Man has walked on the Moon, developed and dropped the atomic bomb, peered into the heart of the DNA from which we are made, and sent messages around the globe in mere seconds. Thank goodness we, the enlightened children of our ancestors, are immune to such craziness.

Think again.

Kinshasha, Democratic Republic of Congo, 2007. As many as 18,000 children roam the streets, estranged or abandoned by their families. Poverty rates in the country’s capital have risen so high that families will do almost anything to reduce the number of mouths to feed. Thus the trend has become to accuse a child of sorcery. Test them. Try them. Punish them. Banish them.

Kill them.

The Salem trials never really ended, they just changed venues; adjusted victims. A whole new market has opened up, as religious charlatans accept money to “drive” the evil from the children. The true evil, the evil that can allow these events to happen repeatedly throughout human history is trapped inside of us. It is a part of us. Wherever we go, so goes it. We carry it with our fear and ignorance. We pass it around in our Bible tracts and sermons. We shout it out across the land in Friday prayers.

I encourage you to watch the following video, not because you can do anything to change the world. Watch it and know that you are not enlightened. You are no different from the jury members at the Salem trials. We all deserve a dose of humility as long as this goes on anywhere…

• Tags: 1692, 2007, Congo, Salem, video, witch
• Comments(0)

by Pappy November 3rd, 2007 ,  Posted in: Religion

Religion: the equivalent to mental cholesterol. It blocks the arteries of the intellect and places blinders on personal accountability. It infuriates me to see people constantly defend religious practices and teachings that quite frankly have no place in modern humanity.

Today’s rant: Wife Beating

Cherie Blair, the wife of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, gave a speech defending a religion she obviously knows nothing about stating:

“It is not laid down in the Koran, that women can be beaten by their husbands or that their evidence should be devalued, as it is in some Islamic courts.”

Historian Robert Spencer tells us this is not the case. In fact the Koran 4:34 tells men to chastise their wives after first warning them and sending them to sleep in separate beds. The word “chastise” is one of the milder translations of the verse. Many editions use the words “scourge” or “beat”.

Pickthall edition: “and scourge them”
Yusuf Ali edition: “(And last) beat them (lightly)”
Al-Hilali/Khan edition: “(and last) beat them (lightly, if it is useful)”
Shakir edition: “and beat them”
Sher Ali edition: “and chastise them”
Khalifa edition: “then you may (as a last alternative) beat them”
Arberry edition: “and beat them”
Rodwell edition: “and scourge them”
Sale edition: “and chastise them”
Daryabadi edition: “and beat them”
Asad edition: “then beat them”

Ah, but those that try to defend Islam are constantly assaulting Mr. Spencer’s study of the religion. So fine, don’t believe Spencer. How about Saudi cleric Muhammad Al-’Arifi. On a recent Ramadan television program for young people Al-’Arifi not only clarifies the Koran’s teachings on the subject, he goes so far as to explain how hard you should beat your wife, and you should beat her with a toothpick. Just don’t hit her as hard as you would a child or a donkey…

Beating in the face is forbidden, even when it comes to animals. When a person is beating an animal… Even if you want your camel or donkey to start walking, you are not allowed to beat it in the face. If this is true for animals, it is all the more true when it comes to humans. So beatings should be light and not in the face. Some religious scholars say: “He should beat her with a toothpick.” I happen to have a toothpick with me. A man who is angry with his wife because she doesn’t get it… If he says to her: “Watch out, the child has fallen next to the stove,” or: “Move the child away from the electrical socket,” and she says: “I am busy” – then he beats her with a toothpick or something like it. He doesn’t beat her with a bottle of water, a plate, or a knife. This is forbidden. The scholars said he should beat her with a toothpick.

Say what you want, apologize if you must Mrs. Blair. If Islam’s teachings embarrass you so badly, then bury your head in the sand. But do so using actual research and facts, not what your Liberal party authorized interpretation of Islam says.

Another religious book I hate, the Bible, does at least tell you to “judge a tree by it’s fruit”. The fruit of Islam lies rotten on the floor all over the world: women who are beaten, and girls whose opportunities for education are routinely stripped from them. In the Islamic world, women are baby making machines whose purpose is to provide soldiers and suicide bombers. No amount of apologies or misinformed speeches by Westerners who feel the need to defend Islam will ever make me believe otherwise.

• Comments(0)

by Pappy November 1st, 2007 ,  Posted in: Business

My dander is up this morning.

We have this new “analyst” the Chief Financial Officer of the company decided to hire to examine our numbers. From the day he was hired, he got under people’s skins asking incredibly stupid questions, making poor asumptions about what was “wrong” with the business, etc..

But he has a Masters degree in international business from the Thunderbird School of International Business; so prestigious an institution that I bet you’ve heard of it too? He has a paper that says he is supposed to know what he is doing. He are smart. The man loves his paper so much that he put it in a frame. Not so unusual, many people with degrees like to frame them and decorate their walls. But this guy framed it and placed it at the front of his desk, propped up so you had to look over the top of it to see him. Like I said, he are smart and he want you to know he are smart…

Before I finish my tale, let’s examine some of American Heritage Dictionary’s definitions for intelligence:

in-tel-li-gence (noun)
a. The capacity to acquire and apply knowledge
b. The faculty of thought and reason
c. Superior powers of the mind.

A college degree proves you can acquire knowledge. It says you have good enough short term retention that you can answer some tests about it. Upper level degrees are supposed to have requirements to ensure you have the ability to recognize context within your area of specialty and apply said knowledge. It has been my experience, on the other hand, that once somebody has that degree in hand, all reasons for pursuing it are dropped, and their thoughts turn immediately to using it to justify a nice salary so they can pay off their student loans. Take someone with some practical life and job experience and send them to college however, and you will see a person that learns from the standpoint of practical applicability from day one. They will know the right questions to ask their academic superiors. They will retain.

So, enough espousing on my part, lets get back to what really set me off today, shall we?

Our moron with a mail-order MBA comes into the IT shop and asks one of our systems admins to explain to him why the “Month to Date” numbers for October and “Quarter to Date” numbers are identical.

For those of you who may have never dealt with corporate finances before, most companies operate on calendar quarters; meaning 1st quarter runs from January to March, second quarter from April to June, third quarter from July to September, and fourth quarter from October to December. If you are in the first month of a new quarter, the numbers for the two will always be identical. It is corporate finance 101. It is so simplistic, and so essential to understanding and reading these values that almost anyone, finance department or not, degree or not, knows this instinctively.

And our guy, this “expert” they brought in, has to come to the Information Technology department to get it explained to him. Oh yeah, he’s a bright one.

In conclusion, can I please, please, please beg of you: if you want to pursue a college degree, please do so. But not until you’ve done some grunt work. Get an apprenticeship in the industry you wish to work in. Work in the mail room, sweep the floors, do whatever you have to do to get your foot in the door first. Then ask questions. Let those around you know you are deeply interested in understanding the business. You’ll be surprise how many of us will take the time to explain it to you and mentor you into the real way things work. You’ll also be surprised at how many of the most knowledgeable people in that business carry no degrees at all. When you do finally go pursue that degree you’ll immediately be able to ask meaningful questions of your professors. You’ll know the difference between what they teach you in school and how the real world works (believe me there are many.)

Just don’t become yet another moron with a mail-order MBA.

• Tags: college, degree, idiot, MBA, moron, stupid, work
• Comments(0)

by Pappy October 31st, 2007 ,  Posted in: History

I’m a history buff, plain and simple, and what I like most about history is the act of re-discovery.

The snippet of events taught to you during History class in school is rarely accurate, and usually meant to paint and glorify our heroes in the most dignified light. Reality, on the other hand, is so much more detailed, vivid, and rich with the humanity of our fore bearers.

Take for instance, the most recent period I’ve taken to reading about: the American Revolution.

Note, I’m not talking so much about the Revolutionary War, but the mindset and sense of rugged individualism that eventually led to the War for Independence. The period of the Revolution really began in 1763, as unpopular taxation and colonial control measures began pouring out of the British Parliament. Although most American school children will tell you King George III was responsible, the real architects of this heavy-handed management of British colonies in North America were Prime Minister George Grenville, Charles Townsend, and other British politicians seeking to resolve rather stifling economic and taxation problems at home in England. From 1763 through 1773 they passed a series of acts designed to recover the national debt via trade controls and new taxes. Meanwhile, in the colonies loyalty to the British crown remained high, but these acts became increasingly unpopular and caused many colonists to examine their place in the British empire on a larger scale than simply economics.

And so were born the Sons of Liberty.

Contrary to modern belief, the Sons of Liberty were originally nothing more than a political action group. Their main focus was on generating a groundswell of opposition to the enforcement of these new trade and tax acts, and on coordinating the participation of colonial assemblies in that opposition. Their members included well known names such as Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and James Otis. They were often at odds with more radical, street level groups who also used the name Sons of Liberty, who saw action and violence as the best way to attempt redress of British wrongs.

But what of their personalities? What was it like to participate with them in the furtherance of their political beliefs? One case in particular, I think, demonstrates the group mind and sense of comradery between the Sons of Liberty more than any other.

In June of 1768, things were coming to a head in Boston. Several of John Hancock’s ships had been seized on trumped up charges in an attempt at criminalizing and discrediting this very influential man. The Sons of Liberty held a meeting at Faneuil Hall, also know as the “Cradle of Liberty”, and determined to send a petition to Massachusetts governor Francis Bernard, asking that these heavy-handed tactics of the British be stopped. Several days later, on order from London, the governor appears before the Massachusetts assembly, requesting that it stop participating in attempts to unite the colonies in resistance to the Townsend Act.

After hours of debate, a vote was taken, with 92 in favor of continued resistance and 17 against. The governor had proved totally unable to deal with the assembly as the king’s agent. Most telling, however, is how the Sons of Liberty celebrated this victory.

Later that evening a party was held in Boston, with much fanfare and public participation. These gentlemen, our forefathers whom we treat as such saints and with much reverence, partied as if they had already won the fast approaching war. No less than 92 toasts were made that night to their victory; one for every patriot who struck a blow against British rule with their votes. 92 toasts. Let me say that again: 92 toasts. Think back to your most raucous college party days. Did you ever attend a party where 92 drinks were consumed by every one in attendance who could still stand?

These guys knew damn good and well how to party.

It is that youthful, rebellious, celebratory attitude that won our independence as a nation. It’s gotten us into plenty of trouble as a nation over the years as well, but that spirit is the definition of America. May we never lose it.

Party on, dude!

• Comments(0)

by Pappy October 30th, 2007 ,  Posted in: Writing

Introduction

I wasn’t always a modern day wizard. Indeed, after years of looking for and failing to find a better alternative, it still doesn’t feel right to use that word. Wizard, after all, implies an adept of the arcane, a master of the mystic. But as my story will reveal, magic is neither arcane nor mystic, and I am neither adept nor a master. But to my knowledge, I am one of a handful of individuals who have stumbled onto the rediscovery of magic and an understanding of its source; knowledge that in this modern society of science and technology is worth more than all the processing power of the world’s super-computers combined.

Believe it or not, this knowledge came to me by the fusion of my choice in career path, and a penchant for juggling hobbies and interests as readily as a clown man-handles bowling pins. A student of anthropology, I focused my collegiate endeavors on religions’ influence on human cultures. The science of shared perception, that groups of individuals could in essence create their own concepts of reality in order to explain what their sciences could not, intrigued me. To really understand how these perception were built, however, I had to weigh in factors from myriad other aspects of that culture. From their level of technological advancement to the vagaries of sexual mythos, to understand the rise of religion in a culture one needs to understand almost every other aspect of a society’s evolution.

This naturally led me to dabbling in hobbies across the sciences. Agriculture, metallurgy, and historical context became evening playgrounds after the term papers and homework were complete. When I got around to examining the evolution of major modern religions such as Christianity and Islam I delved deeper into telecommunications, chemistry, and even physics to create my contextual reference points.

Most people would be shocked to learn that modern theoretical physics much more closely resembles New Age metaphysics than it does Einstein’s indelible E=Mc2 or the birthing of atomic energy. Today’s theorists are contemplating the very nature of existence. They ponder that the Universe itself exists only as we perceive it, and that by changing our collective perceptions we can change the Nature of our own realities. Great minds in physics evaluate factors from not 3 or 4 dimensions, but from as many as twenty-six dimensions; most of which are beyond human comprehension.

To boil it down, the line between science and religious beliefs are blurring, and whether believers understood it or not, I came to the conclusion that believing in something might just be enough to make it real. The most difficult part of this is so simple it’s nearly comical. You see, how does one believe in something when it violates every essence of thought the logical mind has come to recognize? It’s more than just a temporary suspension of dis-belief; one must accept these new realities without cause, nor basis in thought, the way we know the ground is there beneath our feet even when our eyes are closed.

It requires the absence of thought.

• Tags: magic, miscellanium, Science, story
• Comments(0)