Words often fail but spewing them out anyway has to work some time right? Monday, Nov 10 2008

I get the impression that I’ve said this before but fewer people read these kinds of posts when I make them than have passed down my street in the time it took me to navigate to this point on wordpress.

It doesn’t matter what age you are, it doesn’t matter what you have and haven’t done or been through in your life. There will be times when you simultaneously hurt yourself and others with words becuase you just absolutely feel like you needed to say something. Maybe you were looking for “the truth”, maybe you were trying to explain it as you see it, maybe you just like to ruin your own happiness?

Whatever the case these stupid events are going to happen in your life and they will likely crop up when you least expect them to, and when they are seemingly the least fortuitous. I want to tell you not to anticipate these events with dread but I’m doing all I can at the moment to keep things in perspective after having just gone through one for the who-knows-what time in my life.

So the only thing I can share with you is my philosophy that regardless of the consequences of your choices, as long as you can look back on it later and realize that you’ve learned something and changed even the slightest bit, then you weren’t totally mistaken. I recognize well that this is self-justification, but doesn’t everybody need some of that at times?

Again speaking from a philosophical point of view, those that live in the moment are generally able to be happier at any given moment,  but those who take a longer view of life tend to be more successful and stable. You need to try and find your own balance in life but my point is that it’s OK to become consumed in what you feel like is your own absolutely failure for a while. But you shouldn’t just throw the event away, some day you should take the chance to look back on it so you can try to avoid making the same exact mistakes over and over again.

I’d like to leave you with a message of hope that everything always works out. I really do  believe that. But the flip side is that you don’t always get to choose what the outcome will be even if you play a part in shaping it. For some people that’s the greatest source of despair and I’ve been known to get pretty bleak about it myself. But I want you to pause for a second and try to think about the ways in which our world is all the more beautiful because it’s this way. I should get you all started but I am going to crap out for today because I am tired, weary, and downcast. I want to relish my own moment of misery for now before I have to get back to business as usual later. I was going to say that I’d enjoy receiving such comments but the bright side about the utter lack of commenting I get is that I don’t have negativity heaped on me either. And today I’d rather be a blissfully ignorant bad writer than the best writer in the world who hears even one dissenting voice.

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Like a story about a ghost detective Thursday, Sep 4 2008

Actually I would not be opposed to reading a story about a ghost detective right now. Maybe I could make a seemingly innocuous religiously subversive children’s story. Maybe I should stop sharing my most potentially lucrative ideas. I think it tells you something about the obscurity of my ideas if that is what I consider to be one that has the most mainstream appeal. I also came up with a moderately good idea for a website that in fact could make me a small sum of money. Perhaps I should act on this? Perhaps I should not try and make money off of it. Hmm… Well we shall see. I could use some money to be sure. There is not necessarily anything to stop me from just doing it from this blog other than how it would be stifled. Oh well right?

So anyway back to me not knowing how to start paragraphs or sentences properly. I was recently contacted for the first time in many years by someone who was once very dear to my heart. I wish that I could say this person still is but time erases such bonds, there is certainly a chance to reconnect though. I need to eat and have a stupid errand to run, I wanted to see nobody Mardy Fish (well he did win a Masters years ago) beat Nadal at the US Open. I want to see Sarah Palin vanish from the news as soon as possible but the whole thing is pretty juicy, better than a lot of fiction I’ve read honestly. Poor America. I didn’t say it after 9/11, through Afghanistan and Iraq^2 or hurricaneX but I am saying it now after this VP candidate popped out. Americans are so fucked, they are downright reamed.

Back to this friend though. We once made what I would have called a promise that has been referred to by other terms which are not necessarily all positive. It seems like this is still alive. I am not disappointed by this. I never forgot this person and I guess that I myself was never forgotten. Maybe that was not any good for either of us but I think that it is nice and it means a lot to me. I’m not sure what it means for my life at this point though. Is it too late to change things? Should I abandon my current course or stay with it? I have some choices to make. In the meantime though I already seem to be in over my head with math and it’s only perhaps the middle of algebra. I can’t tell if my teacher was just bloated and wearing a puffy outfit or actually pregnant in spite of being what I would consider well past the right age. Life is mysterious though so anything is possible.

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Waiting on those young americans Sunday, Jul 13 2008

Well I happened to be pointed towards an article with interesting implications earlier. You can read it here. What is interesting about this is that if it is possible to do emergency surgery on a fetus, return it to the womb, and then have it be born later, it means that if techniques can be perfected it would be possible to make enhancement modifications to a fetus and return it to the womb. I guess that I’m talking about transhumanism/human enhancement here. Until now I had assumed that to create enhanced children you would have to do just that in a synthetic environment, or you would have to transfer a fetus to an artificial environment for the enhancement and leave it there. And I have indeed seen fiction that had such a procedure (remove fetus and leave it out) before (yeah I’m just talking about gundam seed). But perhaps this does not have to be the case. It does not seem to me like there would necessarily be great advantages to doing so from the enhancement side, but any given creature is more likely to survive in its natural environment and of course for the fetus that means the womb.

I would be a little interested in hearing more about surgeries of this kind but it is not my area of interest so I will not seek anything out. I will say quickly about transhumanism that it usually strikes me that those who are its greatest advocates are those who feel the most socially (especially people who are autistic) and/or physically deficient. And as a result they envision either being transformed into perfection themselves or a race of near perfect beings as a following generation. But it occurred to me lately that it would be easier to induce specific “flaws” that seem to lead to other benefits than to basically try and recreate humanity, or even to isolate and correct potential flaws. Actually the thing I was thinking about was intentionally creating children that have “high functioning autism” known commonly as “asperger’s syndrome” in the hopes of creating a genius generation. This thought came about because I used to discuss transhumanism with a variety of people online who identified themselves as being “aspies” and it seemed like each of them were obsessed with it to varying degrees. I often thought that almost any of these people had the intelligence to achieve such ends but they had totally lost sight of the fact that they were geniuses now in the midst of their feelings of isolation.

It isn’t easy being different, and it might be worse when you are different in ways that you will not be rewarded for socially. For example a lot of professional athletes  (mostly distended looking basketball players) actually have freakish physiques in some ways and are known for not being the smartest people in the world. But because professional sports are a worldwide obsession they are rewarded and idolized for these differences instead of being penalized. Not so for a person who might have a 140+ IQ but also has Asperger’s syndrome. At best they can possibly hope for academic renown or professional esteem among colleagues, but they are very unlikely to become renowned and beloved within their country let alone the world.

Well allegedly the incidence rate of autism keeps increasing yearly but whether it’s genetic, which would imply that it is an evolutionary trait (less emphasis on the physical and social, more emphasis on the intellectual, not that people with autism are necessarily deficient physically), or environmental (polution, vaccination, stress on the mother during pregnancy, etc.) which would imply that it’s some sort of unnatural mutation is unknown. I personally suspect a combination, maybe genetic mutation was caused by something people did but now that the trait is there it is within the population. Hell who knows maybe even depression is an evolutionary trait for population control…

But back to what I was saying, with the decline of physical requirements on daily life it makes more sense to head in an intellectual direction. And it occurs to me that it would be a lot easier to figure out how to induce a trade-off condition like asperger’s and possibly even more beneficial in the long run. Of course what I’m talking about it is a perversion of nature and a giant human rights violation.

So let’s be clear on something, I am not advocating this at all. This is merely my impression from various information that I have gleaned over the years. Personally I think that if the human race really will (re)turn to sludge without transhumanism that is fine. I actually do think that the future is very dark for living beings in the world and it is all each of our faults. So it is only right that after making such colossal mistakes and not uniting to change anything that we would have to pay the price. What that is remains to be seen. I would actually prefer to live until the end of humanity if at all possible but if I do not it won’t exactly be a regret.

I will let you judge for yourself whether these thoughts are delusional, cynical, anxious, or just pessimistic.

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putting satan out of a job Friday, Jun 13 2008

Even I feel weird lately to bring up the name “satan”. I’m not even really christian. Some would disagree on that one but that’s mostly because I live in a christian country. I think a lot of that is name only but whatever that’s another story. The point is that I feel like I’m tempting something, maybe fate, maybe the devil, maybe nothing, by having the thought “the christian devil is a mere caricature compared to what humans themselves have done”. I guess that even more than I wish that there are no horrors beyond what I have known or heard or seen imagined, I wish that humans aren’t really the worst.

Just think about that for a minute even though it is as bleak as hell. What if there really isn’t anything else? What if we’re it? And we have already done and persist in doing the worst to ourselves with the little time we have. That’s just disgusting. I can’t even muster a cuss word about that.

What brought on these bleak thoughts was the book “The Devil of Nanking” by Mo Hayder, an english woman. I don’t know why the hell I read the book, it’s just one of those things that happened and there’s no going back afterwards. It’s a fiction novel, I’d call it a “thriller” but that’s open to speculation. For the most part it’s a novel that accumulates and builds up various horrible and unspeakable acts to the point that for me personally by the end of the book I couldn’t even muster any shock.

I wouldn’t say that anything about the book is great and probably it’s a fairly obscure title that might even ruin people to read (certainly all kinds of innocence could be destroyed by this book) but once I started reading it just to pass some time I could barely stop until I was through with it. So this is a rare work in which the contents surpass the sum of their parts to draw you in. In other words this is a real story, and that’s pretty rare.

I kind of wish I hadn’t read it. Not as much as I wish that nothing about the book was real from Nanking to World War II to the Holocaust to The People’s Republic of China and myself but that is the way it goes. Stories like this have a steep price, if you’re lucky it’s just peace of mind for a little while but if not they can ruin you for good.

I guess the question the book presents you with is whether or not ignorance is the same as evil. Or perhaps more to the point, whether otherwise inexcusable actions are excusable through ignorance. I suppose I’m as qualified to answer that as anyone, perhaps especially because I’m biased on the matter. But for that same reason I don’t want to answer. That isn’t something I want to think about.

No that’s not it. The real issue is that if I forgive now then I will have absolutely nothing left. So I’ve never even thought about it. I’ve blessedly forgotten so many things and the edge has faded over the years but I’ve never issued total forgiveness. I guess I’m the type of person who might pardon crimes but would refuse to let off a criminal. I know deep down that there are always reasons for things, and that if you’re admitting to a reason then you are accepting an excuse but… I just can’t let it go. Instead all I can hope for is that all the ones who came after me and the ones who never had to experience anything will be left alone. But I don’t think that will happen, instead all I can really hope for is that I won’t have to see it again. Any of it.

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