Copenhagen Fail ~ALEX

Hey all, another blog post from me. This one's only quick.

A few days ago, we received the results from the Copenhagen climate summit. And the result is that ALL THE WORLD'S COUNTRIES have agreed to keep global warming to only a 2 degree increase! Remarkable!

First of all, I'll bring up the obvious points:
1. I don't believe in global warming. Nothing against those who do, but that's just me personally.
2. Youth Decide's decision to reduce emissions by 50% (wishful thinking!) cheapen the opinion of the world's youth. It was essentially the equivalent of the 2-year-old who says "I wanna be a ca-pila!" and everyone says "Awww how cute" and thinks; "Yeah right."
3. The plane trips and burning of fossil fuels in transit was an obvious irony.

Now to the main point. Saying "we want to keep global warming to only a 2 degree increase" is like saying "Global Warming is bad. We must think of a way to stop it!" Basically, it accomplishes nothing. I probably thought harder about it more than the entire body of countries, and I slept less in the process (zing! refer to pictures in various newspapers of country reps. sleeping through meetings).

As I said, I don't believe in Global Warming. However, this isn't about Global Warming. It's about government incompetence. We elected you, the least you could do is to be competent. K.Rudd, where are you when we need you? Surely you must be competent, even if every single member of the labor government isn't?

I'll blog again soon. Comment if you have more to add or acknowledge my opinion (good or bad).

~Alex

I feel all Christmassy inside ~Alex

Ok, so I normally write about a lot of other things, things that actually matter. Well, I think seeing as it's around Christmas time, I should comment on my own views on the subject.

First of all, I am not an Atheist. I am not a Christian. The truth is, I believe in a higher power that co-ordinates all things including our own actions but does not need to be constantly and readily acknowledged. Fair enough belief right? (If you observe my religion on Facebook it's listed as Church of Dalland, but even I know it's only more legit than Scientology...)

Anyhow, long story short that's what I believe in. Here are some other views I have on religion;

1. Atheism is a religion.

Think about it. In the UK, Atheists have started to advertise themselves upon buses, expressing the great possibility that there is no god. Atheists are constantly religion-bashing and trying to convince others that Atheism is, in essence, "the one true faith" (this is not a quotation, merely a likening of their point to one more fitting for someone part of the world's largest [non]religion.) If you ask me, mainstream atheism has all the hallmarks of a real religion. Therefore, they should make and celebrate THEIR OWN HOLIDAYS! If you hate Christians so much, why do you celebrate their religions? This should be made clear to all serious atheists, so that you can celebrate your own damn religions.

2. Christmas Message.

People complain a lot about teaching stuff in school, a good example being Creationism/Evolution. Teaching the Christmas Message should be compulsory in school if you celebrate Christmas i.e; almost everyone. Unless you strongly don't celebrate Christmas in any way, then you are exempt. Otherwise however, you must learn the meaning of Christmas in order to better appreciate the purpose of the celebration. Otherwise it's just a free ride, and really that's not fair to Christians. I don't suddenly decide "Yes, it's bar mitzvah time! Ca-ching!" despite the fact that I am definitely not jewish. No. Do others? Not that I know of. Christmas and Easter are two different stories. Don't celebrate something that you don't believe in. Just don't.

3. The ongoing argument.

Leave people to their own religions. If you're Christian, don't try and convert others, especially with fancy commercials and edgy billboards. Religion should not be cool. Period. Religion is an answer to life, not an impulse purchase at the checkout of Woolworths. This applies to Atheism as well. Don't purposefully try to disillusion others of their religions, that's just like walking up to small children and carefully making an air-tight argument about how Santa Claus doesn't exist. As is said; "You're just jealous because you're not having any fun."

I celebrate Christmas, despite my non-Christianity. However, I do hold the belief that it's likely that 2009 years ago as of December 25, a man named Jesus was born, and lived a life that ended with a crucifixion. I don't deny this, and indeed, it's completely possible that all these events happened. Many people can argue; "But how do you know he rose from the dead, and was God's son?"

Well, that's why they call it a 'faith'.

Comment if you have any extra opinion,

Alex

Anthony-'Tis the Season to be Grumpy, tralala, lalalala.

Ah, Christmas. For us in Australia, this means no school, lots of sun, warm pools, lazy afternoons and all the pleasures of shopping in a crowded mall in 30+ degree temperatures.

James, a good friend of mine, has started blogging. His post is below, for your viewing pleasure.
(James, I have made some minor alterations to your post, I'll run over them with you as soon as you give me your email). As he has already made many points about consumerism and the meaning of Christmas, much of what I was going to say has been rendered redundant.

I will instead focus on something better: How cold it is in England. According to Rob, it is cold enough to freeze his nipples off.
The temperature over there is predicted to be somewhat in the region of 0 degrees.
Fun times.

As i type, there are a bunch of disorderly and loud people having a social get-together a few houses down, and I bet that most of them are not very religious. Neither do they, when they open presents, think of Jesus.

Christmas is no longer a primarily religious celebration. I've never met an atheist that would miss out on the oppurtunity to get free shit. That's what it is to me as well. Sure, it's a time to be happy and forgiving, but I feel no guilt for piggybacking of a holiday that someone else invented and believes in. They can do my believing for me, because right now, I'm too busy getting free shit.

All those people who complain and boycot christmas because it;s not their religion have missed the point: It's not a religious holiday. If it was, it wouldn't be a full western celebration. It;s a public holiday.

End.

Quote of the Post:

You have to find a way of working that makes it dead easy to take full advantage of your inspired moments. They never hit at a convenient time, nor do they last long.

Hugh Macleod

James-First Blog Entry -Christmas

Okay, so excuse me if this isn't really good. Believe me, I'm sorry if:

1) It isn't funny, interesting or indeed anything at all
2) This is completely irrelevant and you don't think anything of it
3) If me grammar and spelling is really bad, I may have got an A in English but for some reasons I've always had a problem with grammar (also the bad grammar in that point was an example, I'm not really that bad, but you get the idea)
4) If I make bad puns ( I have a habit of doing it, so please bear with me)

I'm the same age as Alex and Anthony and I'm sure there is no way that I will ever catch up to their high quality of blog writing (note: sucking up, look I need to put in a good word for them seeing as they allowed me to write this entry in the first place), and I also am someone who believes in freedom of the press and stuff like that, much like Anthony.

Now with my introduction out of the way. I will move on to what I really wanted to write about which is the way in which Christmas is marketed now-a-days. So I'm a Baha'i, so I'm not Christian but I firmly believe that Christmas should not be about what it is about now. I'm sure most people would agree with me, Christmas is not a celebration of someone's birthday but rather an excuse for the multi-national companies to sell more stock and drive up profits. Today I went shopping (yes I know I'm over using the brackets and it's getting old but for me going shopping is a big deal) and yes I have noticed this before but seriously I find it annoying how everything is dressed up for Christmas and how you must get everything to satisfy you and your friends and family's appetite for gifts.

It probably sounds like I am nit-picking here, but it honestly annoys me. Every Christmas and every Easter I cannot believe the sham that the holidays have become. If you are Christian then you should be celebrating the birth of Jesus in a way that doesn't involve buying heaps of things, and if you are non-religious (which I know Anthony is) then you should just keep going on with your lives (although I do reckon that the public holidays should be kept because everyone needs the opportunity to get off work and do nothing!)

So I ask you all to think of other this Christmas, and not in the way James and Erica Packer did, they gave a village of Africans a $200 water pump despite the fact that they are amongst the richest people in Australia. No I ask all of the 5 or so people that actually read this blog to help the people in your local community, not with money, but with time and effort, because we must start somewhere in making this world a better place.

Yes I know this blog entry broke at least 3 of the top 4 rules, I'd like to here which ones it was successful in breaking though, just so next time I can make sure that I break all of my rules, coz really who doesn't wanna be a rebel?

Yea, James
( check out my crappy website where I have my own blog that I never write in @: Shoalla.tk)

Anthony: Twilight and the Twitards

For those of you who are lucky enough to be sheilded from this plauge in book form, Twilight, or the Twilight Saga is a poorly written series of vampire romance books which is now being converted into a poorly written and acted series of vampire romance movies.

Normally, I'd just go "Oh, look. No, wait, don't." and go drink some tea and forget about the whole damn thing. My life would be better for it too.
But the most allarming thing about this movement, and I call it a movement for later explained reasons, is its very scary and rapidly exploding fanbase. I should actually call it a 'fagbase', or a 'crazy-obsessive-spastic-base', but for simplicities sake, we stick with fanbase.

There are an astoundign number of people that like this series. Most of them are batshit insane.
Case in point: 40-year old mothers outside studios and movie theaters clamoring for one of the lead actors, a predominatley-shirtless twenty-something. Note that if it were men clamouring for a female, they would all be arrested, because that's just creepy.

You get rabid fangirls who stalk people because they look like one of the main characters, stab people who dont 'believe in Twilight', and otherwise disrupt the normal lives of others.
Go to www.twilightsucks.com, or just google twilight sucks, and you will find a site dedicated to unveiling the giant, readable turd that this series is. On the forums, they have a particularly disturbing section, a catalouge of twilight offenses.

We're talking bricks to the head, home invasion, stabbing, clubbing, abuse, broken limbs and flare gun burns. Almost all by the twilight fans. There are a few incidents where the roles have been reversed, but they are the 5% minority.

Search google, do your own research, and see just how far this thing is going. Its like a religious movement sweeping across the world. The Twilightism. (On a completley unrelated note, join Alex's new religion, The Church of Dowlaaand: It's at least more legit that Scientology)

Have fun, and recognise the series for what it is: An overblown fanfiction about sparkly, vegitarian vampires.

WARNING: READING THIS BLOG CAUSES DIFFERENCE IN OPINION ~Alex

Be warned, I wrote most of this a little while ago, and so some current affairs may be out of date by about 2 months or so. Enjoy:

Here it is. A new topic.

Once again, Alcohol has been criticized. People notice that young people drink and cause violence. This happens again and again, and nothing is done. Why? I don't know. Maybe because alcohol is not seen as bad. They want to stop violence? here's the first thing they did wrong;

1. Alcohol is seen in a completely different light; cast by popular culture and heritage, rather than health and understanding. Ask most teenagers (especially ones with access to alcohol) about alcohol and they'd say; "Oh sure, I'd go and get smashed this weekend. The massive hangover would still be worth it." However, of course having one cigarette would give you lung cancer and kill you. (Please note, I DO NOT endorse smoking, this is purely comparison between two legal mainstream non-hallucinogenic drugs for the purposes of argument. Do not smoke, it's really bad.) Here is the part where they are wrong:

-Alcohol is not only a drug that can be dangerous to you, it can be dangerous to others.

-Alcohol can cause cancers (and no, this is not an 'everything causes cancer' thing, it actually greatly increases risk of getting certain cancers such as mouth and liver)

-People around cigarettes can see smoke, and know when they are at risk. Chances are, you wouldn't see the drunk driver that rendered you a quadriplegic for the rest of your life.

Many people can argue with this, but deep in yourself you know this stuff is true.

When it was decided that mouthwash could increase the risk of cancer (the could [in italics] was later proven false very quickly) people went into uproar. They threw out their mouthwash like crazy, suddenly deciding that they must be at risk. The carcinogen, scientists claimed, was ethanol. Ethanol is exactly the same as pure alcohol, and guess what? You don't drink mouthwash! So while people were chucking out their Listerine, and still having a couple of Bundy&Coke's every night, guess which was the real cancer causer? I shouldn't have to tell you. It's still currently decided on that the two greatest risks of mouth cancer are cigarettes (tobacco, essentially) and alcohol.

Once again, people underestimate alcohol. No matter what people believe, most other mainstream drugs, although they can ruin your life, will not render others around you a quadriplegic. Alcohol can do this, in the form of drunk driving. If you go onto Youtube and look up this stuff it can really be quite scary. People become horribly mutilated as burns victims, and yet Smoking is the only legal drug submitted to biased propaganda.

According to an anti-smoking poster I once saw, smoking will immediately make you bony, with pale paper-thin skin of which cancerous organs are hanging out of. Your breath will be fly-infested, your hair greasy regardless of showering habits, and of course, you will have unexplainable puddles of slime on the ground beside you. THIS IS NOT AN EXAGGERATION, I ACTUALLY SAW A POSTER EXACTLY LIKE THIS. Yet nothing on Alcohol, despite the fact that it's most likely that smoking will not render you a quadriplegic for the rest of your miserable life.

One politician suggested placing warning labels on alcohol similar to those on cigarette packets and packaging of other tobacco products. The difference? Smoking health warnings feature a cancerous lung or such other disturbing picture, with a bad message emblazoned across the pack; "Smoking Causes Lung Cancer." The proposed alcohol warning was a young guy being helped up by his friends. The message displayed? "Don't let Alcohol ruin your night." (This was most likely not the exact message, but it was something similar.) Guess what? Some poor man is going to read that and think 'Oh, I'd better not drink because if I do, I might fall over and cause no obvious damage to myself, which would apparently "ruin my night"' (I hope I accurately conveyed sarcasm through the medium of text).

I'll tell you what would really ruin your night? Getting into a liquor-fuelled fight and getting stabbed multiple times in the back until you slowly bleed to death and die. Or how about drinking until you pass out and throwing up on your own vomit? This can, and does happen. If people are going to be warned about something, why not this? How about making a warning showing a graphic image of a bar patron glassed across the face and displaying the message 'Alcohol Did This To Me'. I swear, there are hundreds more ways alcohol can "ruin your night" than making you fall over or get in a minor fist fight. If you're going to warn people about something, do it right for god's sake.

It's all futile in the end anyway. You can supress something, but you can never completely stop the use of it. Many people still smoke, regardless of the difficulties forced upon them to do so, and many more start. Drinking is no different in this respect. Any vice is safe in moderation, it's when you go over the edge that bad things happen.

How about a big black warning label on Pokies? 'Poker machines cause sore fingers if played for a really long time.' Expect to see it in the near future.

Comment if you want

~Alex

Anthony: Meat in Tubes

I return once more to the blogosphere, bearing tales of my not-so-triumph. Long story short, I had a speech for English to perform on controversial topics, and as you can imagine, I chose a very controversial topic indeed.

It was a tossup between reverse discrimination and Global Warming. But noone gives a shit about discrimination when compared to GW, so I settled on that, having aqquired a book on the topic from Alex (Need to give it back sometime about now).

It did't go too well. I got a lot of dirty looks, and Robbie asked me if I believed the world was flat too.

While I spent about a sixteenth of my day occupied with this speech, it feels as if my wise words are completley wasted on the ingrates I am schooled alongside. Honestly, some of them are just completley retarded.

How am I expected to get up in front of these morons and give a speech while they're probably making cock jokes behind their hands, yelling random crap and being generally malicious? Not to mention the fact that they haveall bludged out of doing any work, and display the equivalent intelligence of a retarded goose.

Geese are silly.

Honestly, it's always the sceptics that take flack. People don't seem to realise that there are always two sides to a debate, and that the scientific process, if not that then at least common sense, entails that two sides or opinions (sometimes more)should be pitted against each other, especially in issues such as this. The burden of sceptecism is a heavy, but nesecary one, partly because when the sceptics are actually correct, they get to lord it out over the losers BIG time. And rightly so.

The world needs to acnowledge the work of the honest sceptic. We still have arguments to make, and are capable of doing so without resorting to yelling or violence, as contrary to your stereotypes, and most of us have not beenlobotimized or integrated into some crackpot religion (On a completley unrelated note, you should so join The Dowlandism religion).

Dick jokes aside, I have another pressing matter to present to the five people that read this: Meat in Tubes.

Think about it. The astronomical costs of breeding, keeping, feeding, killing and processing animals, not to mention the people that are hired to shovel dung and count how many times each cow farts (so they can be taxed for it) could be replaced by the cost of the nutrients needed to grow a large group of abnormaly sized muscles in tubes.

Even better, with these artificial muscles, you get rid of animal rights activists, (or most of them) pesky sanitary investigations and large amounts of animal dung. You could probably engineer the meat to be whatever texture you want it, with whatever section of muscle you want. I'm sure they could manufacture rib-eye and t-bone steaks by the thousand. It solves so many problems. It would put some people out of a job, but those people could be promptly employed
to manage the shipments and administering of the varying nutrient goop mixtures fed to these gross abominations of nature.

Sure, religious groups would go crazy, but just like the time they cloned Dolly and Hitler, it'd die down. They'd see the light once they started eating premium, exelent cut meat for a fraction of the original price every day.
It can't go wrong.

Quote of the Post:
There’s so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?

-Dick Cavette

Only you can not prevent Climate Change.

So, this blog has been conspicuously quiet for a while, considering two people post on it, both of whom are vindictive and angry.

Christmas is coming up, so is Copenhagen. I'm writing a speech about it, be up soon.

I still remember to blog occasionally, see?
Real post soon.

Quote of the Post:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?

-Epicurus, 341 BC, Samos – 270 BC, Athens