The Upcoming Electainment

I find it hard to believe that the current generation of educated individuals hold the electoral process in high regard. It seems that, with all the media attention, that it has far surpassed the point of legitimate politics. What with televised coverage of every action the candidates make and recorded evidence of every word they speak, it has become more of a reality TV show than a campaign trail.

This election in particular has really brought this to the surface. It just feels like I am watching low-quality entertainment. The sad thing is, this is real life. This isn't reality tv where people throw chairs and get drunk and have jobs pretending to be actors while living a house or trying to find out if their ex is cheating on them by going to a scripted hotel. This is real life. This is an election.

But just look at what is happening here. It's the most fantastic and dramatic circle of back stabbing, betrayal, and ignorance the world has ever seen! Let me break down the candidates for you how I see them:

President:

Obama: Is he black? Is he Muslim? Does he even like America? Who knows, and quite frankly, who cares! He's different, he's quiet, he seems to know a lot about something, though for the life of me I can't figure out what it is. But hey, he's nice, and that's what counts, especially in a world where everyone is trying to kill one-another.

McCain: A man so old that the silver in his fillings was brewed in the earth shortly after he was conceived. He is running for president with the one slogan that could ruin any man: "I support Bush". What with Bush's political support ratings currently less than Nixon's during his impeachment proceedings, it makes you wonder why a man would sell his career down the drain before it even begins.

Vice-President:

Hillary: A guaranteed victor in this role of "second-best", Hillary is known for her amazing ability to manipulate the world with her mind controlling abilities. It is believed that if you stare directly into her eyes, she will steal your soul from your body, and make you her mindless slave. She is the only one with any real intelligence, playing the cards to her total advantage. She has realized that, with Obama being the most likely President to be assassinated in the history of the United States, and McCain being almost 7,000 years old, she sees the opportunity to be President without even needing to put forth any effort.

I'm sorry, but it's completely undeniable that this election is purely for the entertainment of the viewers. It goes from comedy, to drama, to romance, to... anything before you even have time to judge it.

So welcome, to Electainment TV!

No Gun Laws

Today in Psychology of Health, we were separated into groups to discuss the different forms of stimuli involved in particular scenarios. So, as people do when they are placed into groups, we began talking about something completely off topic. Today I was fortunate enough to be paired with my friend Kate, who I have known for a good five years at this point, and some random person guy who was once a member of the Army. He was a grunt, and like almost every service man who signs his soul away, he came back from war hating his country, his government, and everything he once believed he stood for.

I want to make a side note here: I have in recent months made friends with a great many former servicemen. There seems to be an epidemic in the making here on a psychological level for many of our soldiers. It seems that a Vietnam-like response is happening with the war on terror. Everyone knows that when soldiers came back from Vietnam, the public ridiculed them and made their lives hell. Now it seems that instead of the public beating up the soldiers, the soldiers do it to themselves. I don't know a single grunt,or officer come to think of it(of which I will admit that I only know two), who has come back from Iraq and not hated everything about himself.

Odd really.

Back to the point, though. This guy in front of me started talking about how much he hated America. I'm fine with that, because honestly, I hate this place too. Apparently, we hated it for different reasons. I'm a big fan of taking matters into my own hands. I don't trust anyone, nor do I enjoy putting faith in others. It makes me uncomfortable. This goes for everyone; friends, family, police, etc. Well, this guy started telling me how America was all screwed up because of the fact that anyone can carry a gun.

I'm sorry, but that is one of America's saving graces. The guy started telling me how much safer Europe was than the states. I couldn't help but laugh at his misfortune. He was arguing with me, an Englishman with a great deal of personal experience with English life, about how England is safer than America. Let me explain just how wrong he was:

America grants citizens the right to carry a weapon. Granted, it runs the risk of putting registered firearms into the hands of bad people. It also gives good people the chance to carry exactly the same firepower as their enemies. Let's face it, police officers aren't always there. In fact, issues involving civilians quarrels aren't even high on their list of priorities. If someone were to pull out a gun and threaten to kill me, I would like to have the same luxury of drawing a weapon on him. Fighting fire with fire can be extremely useful at times.

England, however, doesn't have that luxury. In the UK, if you want to get a gun, you can. It's illegal, and you have to go through some shady ass people, but it's possible to do. This limits the possession of firearms to bad people. Cops don't even carry guns in the UK. It's considered "unsafe". Think about that for a minute. If a guy draws a gun on you in England, your options are as follows: give him everything you own and beg for you life, or try to punch him- hard- hard enough that he'll go down in one hit, or you're dead.

I'm sorry, but gun control is a terrible idea. Bad people will always find a way to get weapons. I would like a fighting chance if I find myself being held at gunpoint. But hey, that's just me.

ESP or Evolution?

I was reading my Philosophy of Learning book when I came across this little tidbit of information. Apparently, it has been examined and studied, rather closely, that "more people believe in ESP, a collection of phenomena that science has not been able to verify, than believe in evolution, a theory that has received enormous scientific support." (Lefrancois 13)

Don't get me wrong, I've always known that evolution has been argued by the blind. I mean, it's hard for the ignorant to understand science. Knowledge scares them. I think their reaction to education is similar to the reaction of cavemen to fire. It's scary, it's dangerous, and quite frankly, it hurts them. For even an ignorant idiot to stand up and say "I'm telling you, my sister can read my mind, one time she passed me a bag of chips when I hadn't even asked for them. But that there fossil aint no proof of nothing! I don't care if there's clear and obvious connections to modern day mammals, that there rat is clearly just a retarded rat!

But hey, now that I've clearly stated my opinion, what do you think? Do you believe in evolution? Do you believe the Earth is the third planet from the sun? Do you believe in gravity? Do you believe in ESP? If your answers were anything other than yes, yes, yes, no, then I propose this question for you to sit down and think about: What is wrong with you?

Works Cited:

Lefrancois, Guy. Theories of Human Learning: What the Old Woman Said. 5th ed. Thomas Wadsworth, Belmont CA 2006.

One Way Out

Life is a curious adventure. For me, it is made even more exciting by the lack of adventure that will follow it. As you all know, I believe that once this life is over, there is nothing else. There is no after life, no second chance, nor any reincarnation as an African Warrior Ant. This is it, from beginning to end, this is it.

A lot of people ask me how I can live like that, believing that this is all we get. To me, it's not a matter of planning for the future, or hoping that something will continue on just to avoid the nothing that is inevitably before me. It is simply a matter of truth.

We go through this life making decisions that effect not only ourselves, but countless hundreds of others also. We may not realize we are doing it at the time, but every single action has a consequence. The simple act of purchasing a chicken from the grocery store means that there is one less chicken in the world for someone else. That single purchase may have influenced the market so that more chickens were sold to stores rather than sold/given to charities to feed the starving. In that sense, your purchase shifted food away from the starving and fed your already healthy body inevitably killing a starving man, woman, or child elsewhere in the world.

We cannot function focusing only on consequence. We must live to provide the best possible lives for ourselves, and those we know and love. It is impossible to think for everyone, or hurt no one. Everything will cause someone pain or grief, and give someone else joy and hope.

The truth of the matter is this: Life is here, and no matter what you believe will happen once it is over, there is one thing you can be certain about. You can fight against hurting people, you can fight to achieve your every goal, and you can even fight to survive. But no matter how hard you try, in the end, life its self is the one fight that you will never come out of alive.

100% Genuine!

As I've aged, I have been noticing a large number of changes in the fast food industry. They have really been taking steps in the more recent years to make their food more marketable to the non-grossly obese, so that they too can join the ranks of rapidly fattening individuals. The only problem is, to rope in the health nuts, fast food and microwave food has had to start changing up their ingredients to make them more marketable. Don't get me wrong, it's not that they are good for you, but rather that they aren't quite as bad for you as they once were. I'm fine with all of this, but today I opened up a box of Hot Pockets to find the box reading as follows:

"Now with REAL Cheese!"

What was I eating before?! I have been buying Ham and Cheese hot pockets for years now, and you mean to tell me that up until this box, that yellow delicious inside the bread coating wasn't cheese? What the hell was it then?!

Wendy's did something similar to me also. It was around 2003-2004 when they started to advertise their dollar menu, as did most fast food chains. Honestly, I never had much faith that the quality or grade of meat is high when I'm eating at a fast food chain, but I like to know that what I'm eating is actually the meat I'm ordering. For example, Hong Kong had to close down one of its KFC's because the KFC was substituting its chicken meat for rat meat. I ate there a couple times before they closed it down. So obviously, since then, I have always enjoyed knowing my beef is beef, my chicken is chicken, and my fish is fish. Well, when Wendy's started advertising their 5 chicken nuggets for a dollar, it ran with this slogan:

"Now with all genuine chicken meat!"

Again, what the hell?! What was I eating before? It is called a chicken nugget, so I expect it to be a CHICKEN nugget. Why are you telling me now that all the chicken nuggets I had in the past from you, Wendy, are really just anything nuggets. What meat was in there before it was chicken?!

Stupid world and its crazy food groups.

Wiped!

I have said many times just how much I dislike Mac's:

http://mitchenermind.blogspot.com/2007/10/no-mac-for-me.html

Well, I think it's time for me to make a counterpoint. As someone who knows how to use a PC with above average skills, it is difficult for me to admit this, but there is a feature about Macs that just might be a little bit better than PC's. I recently wiped my PC completely clean. It was acting up, going a bit too slow for my liking, so I decided to get rid of a few programmes to speed things up. I didn't really want to spend a week hunting down problem-programmes, however, so I went out, bought a 250GB hard drive, backed up my essentials, and restored my PC to its factory settings. This was my "shortcut" to an otherwise agonizing week.

Woops.

Clearly, it has been some time since I had to reinstall everything. It's not as fun and easy as one would think. Since I have wiped my computer clean, I have spent approximately 7 collective hours reinstalling everything I need. I'm about 45%  done. 

It is for this reason that I am doing something that I don't often do. I'm admitting that I was wrong. Mac's aren't all bad. They do have one extremely redeeming feature: they keep trucking on at the same speed as the day you bought them, 3 years after you first turned it on. 

However, I still would never get a Mac. 

They're awful...

... just like those who use them.

Chinese Miracle

Today I was flipping through the multiple channels of the sky news website when i stumbled across this badboy of an article:

http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30200-1317088,00.html?f=rss

For those of you who, like me, would just skip over the link without bothering to read it, allow me to explain: An 80 year old half-paralyzed man was discovered in China 11 (eleven!) days after being buried alive by rubble in the semi-recent earthquakes. Apparently, he survived because his wife kept passing him food through an opening which joined their two chambers of trapped isolation. 

This sparked a large number of questions for me.

First, how was this woman getting food? Was she just fortunate enough to be trapped next to a fridge? Chances are really good that if a building is going to collapse on you, you are going to use up all of your luck just living through the collapse. I don't think fate is as generous as to grant you easy access to a refrigerator as well as a nook with air and space to survive. No, I think things may be a bit worse than that. Look at these people. They are 80 years old. They need protein to survive, and lots of it. So, two 80 year old people trapped underground in need of food and protein... perhaps they ate another person? That would be more reasonable, don't you think? They are trapped underground and need food, perhaps a son/daughter-in-law got trapped with them. If the person wasn't loved, it wouldn't be hard for the oldies to consume them in order to survive.

Still, this is pretty crazy. 80 year old people aren't supposed to survive collapsing buildings! If an old lady sits down too hard she shatters her pelvis! This man as trapped underneath a beam for almost two weeks, and somehow, he come out the same way he went in: semi-paralyzed. Crazy. I think the key here is the fact that these people are Asian. If they were white, those old farts would've been dead before the quake had even brought down their house. White people don't deal with pressure well. Look at New Orleans. When those levies broke and that water came pouring in, how many black people migrated to Houston for relief? A lot. How many white people? None. Why? They all drowned! It's a shame, but it's true. We, as white people, are doomed to die whenever anything bad happens. 

It kinda makes me sad I'm not Asian... and 80...