A Rant Pt.2

The (not so) eagerly awaited Rant Part Two.

This has nothing to do with Rant One. I just had two rants, so I thought I'd sequence them. 

Right. 

Onto business. (Or is it into?)

Our country is run by idiots. Massive, mind numbing morons. Who have fluff for brains. I wouldn't give them enough credit to slice bread without killing themselves, and they're running our country. 

This is ridiculous. 

And I'm not only talking about India. Look at our dear friends, the United States Of America. They've got dog poo for a president. Pity. And they call themselves the most powerful country on the planet. Pah. 

But as much of an idiot as Ol' George may be, things look up for America, thanks to Obama. But there's no way I'm going into that here. Its been gone into far too often by far too many people. 

No, back to India. Firstly, we've got a waif for a president. And she also happens to have the personality of a Goldfish. Yeah, she's our first woman president. Hooray. Joy. Let's all sing praises to her, because she overcame the male chauvinism. 

No.

What's the point of having a president, when she doesn't do anything? She doesn't look like she's capable of performing a task more complicated than clipping her own nails. And she's our president. 

Things are looking up for India to become a superpower, then.

But this really takes the cake. I'm not sure if this guy is part of our government, or someone else's. Wait, he was speaking good english. Probably someone else's. But this is what got me really, really, really angry. 

This arrogant son of a whatnot has the gall to say that the creationist theory of the Universe should be taught in schools, along with the Darwin theory of evolution. And he's a minister for something. A minister. He's supposed to have some brains, isn't he?

He goes on to justify his statement by saying that just because there isn't scientific proof for the creationist theory, doesn't mean it shouldn't be included in science textbooks. 

Yeah, because all science textbooks deal with religion, and with other scientifically un-proven 'facts'. 

Religion in schools is another thing all together, to be dealt with later. 

This guy should be lined up and shot. Or strapped to a chair, and thrown off of a cliff. 

Its almost as if he's running on the principle of 'The louder I talk, the more right I am'. There's a reason the creationist theory isn't in textbooks. And that's because its not proven. Its not even a scientific theory.

There's good enough evidence for the Big Bang theory, for it to warrant a place in textbooks. Its a well accepted theory too. And this monkey comes along and tries to shove the creationist theory in there along with it.

But if you're going to have the creationist theory, you might as well have the Hindu, the Muslim, the Buddhist, the Jain, the Zoarastrian and the Confusian theories along with it, right?

Or what about the theory that the world is supported on the back of a gigantic theory?

That should be number one, since its probably the oldest theory.

After all, just because there isn't scientific evidence for the theory, doesn't mean it shouldn't be in the textbooks...

A Rant Pt.1

This is part one of two.

I say of two, because, obviously, there is another one coming. And these are the good rants. The one with all the anger in them. Hopefully, it will make good reading.

So here we go.
Rant One.

Law. And consequently, order. To be precise, Law And Order.

I'm completely in favour of it. Totally. If there weren't any law, there wouldn't be any order. If there were no order, there'd be chaos. And if there were chaos, we'd all be wearing make up and going 'Do you know how I got these scars...?'. Not particularly sane, I'd say.

But more than a problem with law, is the application. Now, laws are often phrased well, so as to leave no loophole, but then there are these ones with tremendous gaping craters in them. I could drive a tank through those loopholes, and not touch the sides.

This, again, isn't my real problem. Loopholes are loopholes. Let them be... they'd make fun rollercoasters.

People should be consistent when they apply a punishment, or apply a law, and hence derive a punishment.

To take a very trivial example... the FIA. They just randomly seem to dole out punishments, often disproportionate to the degree of the breaking of the rule. And there seems to be a certain element of favouritism. But this is a topic of endless debate. All discussion on this ends here.

More seriously, the Hiroshima bombings. About half a million people were killed on that day, and the week that followed, and millions more were affected by the radioation, and crippled for life. Not to mention their kids, and grand kids, who'd have had to go through life with half a brain.

And the Americans did this to 'end the war' and 'end the evil' and other very noble phrases. But it still killed a couple of million people, and is killing a couple of million people. I'd estimate about 7 million people, dead, dying and injured.
And nothing was done to them.

Nothing at all.

Nada.

Zilch.

But Hitler killed 10 million jews, and he was hated by the whole world. The whole world declared war on him, because he started to murder people outside his own borders. And in pretty large numbers as well, he was murdering them. Genocide, I think its called.
But murder he did... and he got stepped on for that. Sure, its twice the number of people affected by the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombs.

But the bombs worked their magic in a couple of minutes, and that's had effect till today. Hitler did everything manually. Didn't have machines do it for him... if anything, the Americans were lazy.

Okay, seriously. I'm sure something should have happened to them (the Americans). Shouldn't they atleast be fined?
But if they are fined... who would they be fined by? The UN?
What makes the UN think they've got a right to fine us?

But then, we come to the crux of all government.
But that's immaterial here.

My point is, something should have been done to the Americans. They killed half the people the Nazi's did, except more subtly. They've got more class.

The disporportionality, and the rationalising of the decision, by saying it 'was to end the war' just infuriates me. Its like me culling a million people, because they had AIDS, or something.

It makes perfect sense. Stop the madness, destroy the source, or just hurt the source so hard, that it sooner or later stops working. It makes logical sense. But then we aren't logical, are we? We're moralistic, and emotional, and other things that detract from our lovely logical sides.

And this is why we cannot make sane decisions, ever. And this is why we should never be allowed to. But sadly, we've decided someone else must rule our lives, but they're human as well. Just more popular.

So this all makes no sense to me.

Help.

Aah-Toe!

... a common enough cry on the streets of Madras. And Delhi. And Bombay. And Bangalore. Heck, in pretty much any city in India.

But what really are these strange three wheeled creatures that roam our city at night? (And by day, and by the afternoon, and dawn, and dusk...)

Three wheels, a body made of the most rickety and unstable substance known to man, and one headlight do not a vehicle make. But apparently they do.

Death traps is what they are. From the wheels that look like they've been taken from a cycle, to the frame, made from plastic straws. Not to mention the demon drivers from hell. They seem to have been blessed with the brains of a groundhog. And the reflexes of a pod racer, thankfully.

And there's this whole culture associated with these guys. The spitting, the screaming, the murder, the boozing, the late night racing... they're like a clan all by themselves. Except they hate one another. Which doesn't make for very friendly boozing, spitting, screaming, murder or late night racing. Not to mention the bargaining. The seemingly sudden rise in inflation when he quotes his price would leave you staggering. And when questioned, he'd give his usual plethora of answers.

"The fuel costs a lot"
"Yes, I agree it does, but you're taking me down the street. My Rolex seems little high a price to pay for that, don't you think?"

"We have to take a circuitous route back"
"But when I came, I came on this incredibly short route, and didn't have to mortgage my house"
"But on the way back, its longer than on the way here. That's how the roads are"

Defy logic they do.

Not to mention the flagrant disregard of rules, which apparently makes you a good auto driver, because I can't think of any other reason that they'd do this. Its lunacy. Its like getting into a roller coaster, except without the seatbelt, and without the safety of a track, and without the knowledge that you're going to end up safe and sound, where you started from.

Or probably Auto drivers have to take a special license, or do special challenges. 'Infuriate as many people on the road as possible in one minute' sort of challenges. And only those who pass get to drive on the streets. There seems to be no other explanation.

Boggles the mind, it does.

Doomsday Prophets et al

I haven't blogged in a while. That's because my brain went into a state of ferment. Its generally vegetating... now it was fermenting.

I've just studied a couple of poems that deal with nature, and how mankind is ruining nature, and how we don't appreciate nature, and how we don't see God in nature, and other assorted arguments for nature.

And these arguments make sense. We've lost touch with nature, and we cannot go back to living in trees, because that's not what we do. We live in houses, with leather sofas. Heck, even the sofas aren't made from things that live in trees. That's a pretty sad state of alienation from the planet that sired us. And we cannot do without our 'privacy' and our 'creature comforts'. We need them.
My point is that we've lost touch, and we haven't really tried to regain that touch, so now we've passed a point of no return, where we cannot go back. Although try we will to save the tigers, and the whales, and the dolphins, and other assorted animals. And prevent global warming, and people on the coasts from drowning. And protect ourselves from swarming insects. We try. We almost always fail. And success is short term.

And at this juncture, we cannot really do much to save nature anymore. I think its far beyond repair. We will continue to loose species at an 'alarming' rate. We will inject greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and further the cause of global warming. And we should all feel sad for ourselves, and blame older people, and the other generation. And feel sorry for ourselves. And try to fix what we can. And feel sorry for ourselves.

I'm not saying we shouldn't try to fix it. We should try to fix it... unless we do what I think is the other option we've got.

The other option we've got is to completely industrialize and urbanize the world. We're really smart people, humans. We built buildings, for heaven's sake. And bridges. And other such industrial marvels. We've got water in the middle of the desert. We've got mid-air refuelling. We've got faster-than-sound speeds. We've got buildings that reach Mars. This is how inventive we are. And we're also the ones who murdered nature, and who completely destroyed most of it.
But those people are the same people who managed to get water in the middle of the desert. We've conquered nature, if you like. More or less. We just haven't completely conquered it, and that's affecting us, through the form of random natural disasters.

But I'm saying completely humanize the world. We need to leave not one trace of nature on this planet. And a couple of generations down, no one would be the wiser. And we'd finally achieve our dream of owning this planet. Although is beyond me why anyone would want to own a large rock. Which spins. In the middle of nowhere.

But I digress. If we could just harness nature in its entirety, then we wouldn't have to worry about global warming, because we would control the 'global' in global warming. We wouldn't have to worry about tigers. They wouldn't exist. We wouldn't have to worry about flies, and mosquitoes, and malaria. They wouldn't exist either.

Nothing major in either direction is going to happen in the next hundred years, so this really doesn't concern me, but I just find it endlessly fascinating that we half heartedly try to 'control' nature. And we've half- succeeded. We just need to succeed more often. Then we'd be set. Or we need nature to dictate what we do. Then we'd be set.
This in-between path is going to get us killed faster than we care.

Not that I care, because I'd be dead at the time anyway.

Just be warned, future generation of people who will not read this blog, because it will be obsolete then. Be warned.

Creationism

I know that's a word. And I also know that I've used it out of context.

What this post is about... (now that's cheesy) is the lack of imagination. I know I've talked/typed about this before, but that was solely in India, and the whole Bolly-Holly-Tolly-Molly issue.

This is completely different. This is a combination and greed, resulting in a massive lack of anything original.

To take an example from TV. There's this show called 'Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?' airing in America. This is a fantastic idea. Absolutely wonderful, for a game show. Apparently it was Howard Stern's idea, which then aired on NBC or FOX or one of those networks. And I am in absolute awe of the idea. Of pitting a 'qualified' adult, against a 'mere' fifth grader. This is the stuff success is made of.

But then other countries, and other people get wind of this idea. And they're greedy. They are really greedy. They smell success. And they want a slice of it.

They take the idea from these guys, and exactly how they do it, I'm not sure. I don't know if they acquire the rights, or if they just steal the idea. But they do manage to steal the idea, and import it into their country. Now's the fun part. They change the name of the series. And they keep the set exactly the same. There are six kids in "Are You Smarter..." and one of them is fat, and three are girls, and one has curly hair, and one likes orange juice, the other likes to eat worms... that sort of thing. And the panel for the new show? Six kids, three girls, one fat kid, one who likes orange juice, one with curly hair, one who likes to eat worms, and so on.

In the original, the panelists walk in, greet the kids, and then take their place. In the ripoff? The panelists stride in, enthusiastically greet the kids, and then take their place. Hence the difference.

Another example I can readily cite, is American Idol. Pop Idol is a fantastic idea, just like all the other 'hits'. Have a round of auditions, to get people on the show, and these people should atleast be half talented. Then get them to go a number of rounds, lasting a number of weeks. At the end of these number of weeks, with a participant eliminated each round, by popular vote, the winner will be chosen, and will be awarded something really big musically.

That's a really original idea, something on the lines of 'Rockstar : INXS'. Then people from America wanted to earn money, so they wanted people to watch TV, so they wanted this show, because it seemed to be hugely popular.

So they got it. And it was a huge hit. But it had exactly the same format as Pop Idol. They even stole a judge of there. And so people started to watch American Idol. And so did the rest of the world. And they loved it. American Idol had set a standard. It had beat Pop Idol at its own game, and it was now the standard. But people from other countries began to get greedy. And they wanted money. So they wanted people to watch TV. And they copied this design.

Down to the last detail. The intro song is the same, they've got three judges, exactly the same, completely forgetting that Pop Idol had four judges, and that was the original. And one judge is mean, a la Simon Cowell. And one judge is a sissy, and one judge is more or less non-controversial.

But people seem to love it, and seem to claim each countries version as their own. Me? I think Indian Idol is rubbish, and is completely run by politics. I don't watch it, because they don't sing songs I like, but last season, a guy who sung like a monkey on coke won, because he came from a place where the TV ratings were low, and they wanted to boost TV ratings.

If you're going to make a ripoff, make it well.

But here's an example of something I think is absolutely fantastic, and not about to be stolen any time soon :
http://www.ultimateshowdown.org/

Just Call Me Sir Lancelot The Stupid

Chivalrousness. Or whatever the word is. That's what this post is about.
Come to think of it... what is the word for chivalrousness? Please help.

Anyway. These last couple of weeks, when I've been taking the bus really often, I thought to myself "I'm not going to be one of those selfish people on the bus. I'm going to be polite, and chivalrous, and really kind, and everyone will love me, and that will be awesome". So I tried. And I'm still doing it. I'm giving my seat to older people, to infirm people. (I love the way 'infirm' sounds like they'd just collapse in the middle of the bus, if it hit a bump or something).

And so I gave my seat to older, and infirmer (than me) people. And there was this awesome time, when I gaev my seat to this guy, who looked about 40, maybe 50. It wasn't as if he couldn't stand for the journey. But I decided I couldn't compromise my principles. So I got up, and offered him my seat. He thanked me, and I smiled, and was quite civil. A couple of ten minutes later, he looked as if he was ready to get out of the seat. And by this time, the bus was quite full, full of people standing, that is. And I could just sense the stampede for the seat, and I didn't want to be in it, so I moved a bit away, to let the nearest cow/cattle run to the seat. And when this guy got off, he stopped the other people from getting into the seat, at risk of his life, and let me sit in it.

That's really, really awesome. That left me feeling great. But then, every other time, the guy/girl, man/lady who took my seat, didn't smile, they just took it. Like it was a matter of protocol. And they didn't thank me, they didn't even acknowledge that I gave them my seat. That I gave up my comfort for theirs.

This was when I realised that I get the bad deal. Every single time. I'm sure chivalrality (?) is a wonderful concept, and a romantic concept... but its stupid. It's innately stupid. Human beings are compassionate, sure. But they aren't stupid. Being compassionate, and being so compassionate, to the point of stupidity. Two completely different things, them.

Yeah, I feel bad for the old lady standing up, which is why I offer her my seat. But that's stupid, isn't it? Compromising your comfort, so some stranger can be happy? Isn't that like obliging someone else, for their pleasure? People wouldn't do it in other situations...

"Hi, I'm a stranger. Could you stab yourself for me please? It would make me happy!"
'Sure thing, stranger"
*stab*
"Ow."
*keels over. Dead*
"haha! That was fun. Do it again!"

No... people wouldn't do this otherwise. Its just a social thing.

So far, this post has had no relevance to the title. Here's where it gets slightly relevant to the title.

I believe Sir Lancelot, or Camelot, or Mixalot invented chivalrality (this is really hard for me to pronounce. Even in my head).
And that person, was an idiot. Why would they do that?

"Here, m'lady. Please use me to step on, so you don't get your feet wet on this puddle"

WHAT?!? Why don't you just ask her to walk around the puddle? Isn't that smarter? Doesn't it make more sense than using your body as a mat?
In my opinion, I think women were as strong as men, to begin with. Then people dissuaded them from walking around puddles. Now they're all fragile, and demanding women's rights.

But along with women's rights, they still want people to be chivalrous to them. Which is exactly the opposite of women's rights.

Just make up your minds. Do you want to be pampered, or do you want to be made to work, and earn, and the rest of the shabang? I know what my choice would be. I'd be very, very content just to have someone else do my work for me.

But no. They have to work, and they want people to be chivalrous to them.

Holy cow, that's just... dithering!

But for the record... I'm still going to be chivalrous, and well mannered, and all that, because it makes people think "Oh, this guy is awesome". And that statement goes against (almost) every word in this post.

But that's life. Live with it.

The Monetary Value Of Cows

So I was thinking (aren't I always?) about the economy. What with inflation, and oil prices, and no petrol/diesel.

Its almost as if humans are living in a world within a world. We've been living in a dream world for the last two millennia. We didn't like living in trees. So we didn't. We built houses, and huts. Then we started to live together, rather than in bits of nomadic tribes. And then we invented words like 'civilized' to pretend like we know what we're doing.

And we build things, like buckets, and wheels, and carts, and bottles, and juice. But we have no way of measuring how much better one human is better than another human, right? So we started to assign values to things, using the rough rule of 'the shinier, the better'. So we got polish, and iron, and other sparkling things, like gold, and diamonds. And everyone went nuts over these things. They were so shiny, that it distracted them from breathing. There were people lying dead all over the place, because they forgot to breathe. Such was the shiny-ness of gold.

And people weren't happy with food, and leather, and footwear, and clothes. No, they had to barter things. So they traded a cow for beans. And the next morning, a large beanstalk was seen growing out of the ground...

So they were bartering. But people made bad deals with other people.
"Sure! You can have my soul. But what do I get in return?"
"Oh, you get this really shiny bit of metal!"
"But isn't that a bad deal for m-.... oooh! Shiny!"

Then people said 'Look, we're better than you. So we shall rule you." And they did. For thousands, and thousands of years. And the Kings and Queens decided to increase their popularity by printing flyers with their pictures on it, and handing it out to the peasants. Sadly, these flyers were made out of shiny metal.

The people couldn't dispose of shiny metal that easily. And plus, it was shiny. So they couldn't just trash it. And they decided to trade it in instead of their souls.

Thus, currency was born. And the King and Queen thought they were pretty popualr with the locals, 'cause demand for the flyers had increased dramatically. But they didn't realise it was a soul-replacer.

But after a couple of years, when the news eventually did reach their royal ears, they were pretty delighted to find out that their faces had replaced the peasant's souls. Then the King murdered the Queen, and married another six hundred.

Meanwhile, back in peasant town, people were still trading in shiny bits. Someone decided to call this the 'economy', because it sounded like a disease. He thought it would be a joke. It was. For a while. Until people realised that by calling it an 'economy', it was very similar to calling themselves a 'civilisation', and now they'd have a legitimate excuse to not know what they're doing.

Once the economy was invented, people started to say things like 'Hey! I'll let you pay me 6 shiny bits to take your soul!".

Then the Kings and Queens wanted more popularity, so they killed other people in other lands, and handed their flyers to the other land people. Then they realised what they'd done. And they were so angry, that they killed even more people, from even more lands. And they realised what they'd done, and they killed people from other lands. And they realised what they'd done...

Then came the industrial revolution. Where people overthrew the Industry. And by now, there was a 'government' and other fancy words, to give people very legitimate excuses to goof off, and not know what they're doing.

And by this time, people had lost the original point of money. It was now printed on paper. Not shiny. Boring.

But they were still flyers. Still trying to advertise people. Except now, it was dead people. Which, again, sort of ruined the point of money.

And now people are saying "Look, I have no money. I'll sell you my cow for your soul..."