Incredibleplum’s blog

Merry Christmas to everyone...

Anyways...

Our economy sucks.  And we're taking over a trillion dollars away from people, either through future tax, massive national inflation, or through the total meltdown in global confidence of the dollar that will cause a total meltdown in the current monetary system.  And now every other business thinks it's shit smells way too great to not be given a little cash because god forbid their stock price goes down to their actual real market value and somebody with some real confidence feels they can do better comes along and actually buys the business.  Sure jobs will be shed.  Such is the free market.  And is that not what will happen anyways when over a trillion dollars is taken away from the people who drive the economy anyways... the fucking consumers...  If the people buying the shit don't have money then they won't buy stuff. When they don't buy stuff than people lose jobs...  Does it really matter whose jobs are lost?  Why not let the assholes who ran there company into the ground lose their jobs first... 

Is capitalism greedy... yes.  Are CEO's selfish...  YES!!!  And although there are some stupid ass shumucks running some companies, money talks, competition is key, and the winner is the smartest greedy asshole who makes the best product...  At least in a world that idiots don't tamper with. 

The most annoying example is the cable company.  The initial cost of a cable company is high, because you have to come up with the equipment.  But after that it's gravy.  A cable company pays little to give you the signal to get cable, yet you pay $100 or more a month for cable.  And this is a forced monopoly!  Their only competition is satellite, which is thankfully catching up, but still not a possibility for my current situation!  But imagine if multiple cable companies could compete for your business.  Both your cable cost would go down, I bet by half, and you'd probably be offered more deals.  Why does this business continue to be allowed a monopoly?  The company that would win the most supporters would give you the cheapest prices for the value of the channels they offered you.  And the more businesses the better the deals would have to be until certain companies would put other companies out of business to meet the market demand.  Once market demand is met businesses would have to be taken over by technologies that were either more technologically advanced, and/or that made the product cheaper.

That is progress people.  Any hindrance to this process is a hindrance to progress.  Greed is what created all the wonderful things we enjoy today.  Unfortunately we have become too Christian today and we have forgotten all of the wonderful things that we have learned from the Greeks (Demosthenes).  Christians teach humility, but it is not humility that has built humanity to it's present state.  Rather, it is humility that put humanity into the dark ages.  The Greeks instead believed that pride, one of the supposed mortal sins of man, was what pushed men to make the world the best place it could be.  The danger to humanity was not pride in ones work, but in humility, which caused men to stop caring about their strengths, and the opposite, hubris (excessive pride) which caused men to believe they were better than they really were.

The Greek lesson was always to "know thyself".  When you do your best to understand your strengths and weaknesses you learn to truly appreciate your worth.  And when you appreciate what you do you do what you can do to the best of your ability with pride.  And that pride leads to a desire to do even better.  And that is where progress lies. 

If we continued with this model, our pride would lead us to progress and better opportunities for everyone.  But instead we preach who is good enough to do business and who is not.  And through our law systems, the virus's in our economic system are aloud to more around from business to business without a thought. 

Anyways...  My two cents...  Anyone agree or disagree?  No judgments here.  I like debate and respect anyone who has the guts to argue rationally, no matter how different they see things, so long as you use some facet of logic...

So, as I had mentioned earlier, my contract at work is expiring.  Friday is my last day.  Monday, however, I start a new job.  I'm just moving over into a new department at the same company.  I may even be getting a slight raise.  The only problem is that this new job is part time.  This might be a good thing, though.  Unfortunately it is tough these days to live on your own working 40 hrs/wk, which I think is a huge problem here in the US, where our desk jobs have us working ourselves into obesity and heart attacks, and then coming home tired with a Big Mac and some Taco Bell.  But I digress...  With this new job I'll be working about 25-30 hrs/wk making about $.50/hr more than I was before.  So now I just need another part time job that pays a decent wage.  Ideally I'll be working about 50 hrs/wk between the two jobs which should be enough to get me into a 1 bedroom apartment rather than a studio.  What I'm hoping is that TSA will finally get ahold of me and give me 20-25 hrs/wk of work.  If I get that job I'll be in a great position, with great benefits and could probably really start saving some money so that I will be ready when my car finally decides to die on me...  And, not to mention, a well deserved vacation sometime in the next year or so, which is definitely needed as I have not been on a real vacation since around 2002 or so.

Also, I might have a date on Saturday.  I'm hoping this one will work out, as I am kind of sick of the whole dating game.  Dating can be awkward, and it's nice when you get past all that and reach a level of comfort.  I shouldn't worry so much, because I usually do a lot better than I think I'm going to do.  I'm actually usually more nervous before a first date than during it.  And strangely, I'm usually more nervous on the second date because I did so well on the first date that I'm worried that I'll end up looking stupid  by comparison.  It's a problem of rumination for me.  I'm thinking so much about all the negative things that could happen that I sort of freak myself out, which I sort of do all the time anyways.  But once I'm on the date my concentration is on the present moment instead of on mapping out every possible thing that could happen, and it turns out alright.  The same thing used to happen when I did oral reports in college.  I usually carried a huge weight of anxiety before giving it and then ended up giving one of the best reports in the class.  The plan thus far for Saturday is the typical dinner (well... lunch) and a movie and if things go well, she suggested mini golf, which I haven't done in years!           

I was just informed that my work contract will not be extended.  So at the end of the month I'll probably be unemployed.  This was sort of half expected as I have been twitling my thumbs behind my desk at work for a while now.  No worries, though, as Spherion has informed me that they've had a whole bunch of new jobs.  Hopefully I'll get one that pays at least as much as I'm currently getting paid.  I'm hoping for more, though, as inflation has sort of devalued my current job.

I was really hoping TSA would call me by now for an interview by now.  I just heard last week that TSA is going to be building a few more security lanes at OIA.  I guess they should be built in 3 or 4 weeks, so it is likely that if they are going to call me it will be in the next couple of weeks so that I am trained in time for the opening of these new lanes.  What is most annoying is that if I get the job I'll likely have to quit whatever job I just got and find another part time job.  

Shit... 

In other news, last band practice saw the birth of another new song.  We all just started jamming out and it sounded really good, so we recorded it, and of course, we didn't play the song as well, but at least the idea is now on tape.  So in all we now have between 15-20 songs that are either done, are being worked on, or are about to be worked on.  We play at least half of them with minimal mistakes.  We still have a long way to go, but the fact that we have more than an albums worth is a great thing.  It means we can pick and choose which ones are album worthy if we ever get a chance to record this stuff onto an album.  Perhaps we could put the others onto an EP or save them for a new album or something. 

I hear people saying that the human population is de-evolving?  Are we?

The answer is no.  You can't de-evolve, it's not a real word.  Evolution means change over time, so regardless of how you are changing you are evolving.  We are always evolving.  We are evolving in strange ways as a species as our genes are being moved to faraway places around the world where our genes would not otherwise be.  And as always we are evolving as individuals as random mutations of genes occur in our bodies and the bodies of others.  Sometimes these mutations happen in our sex cells and get passed on to the next generation, which on a rare occasion benefits the offspring in their ability to survive and reproduce.

So technically we're not evolving.  But are we getting dumber as a population?

Perhaps.  I know of no empirical evidence to support this, but I do know that there are studies showing that people who hold higher degrees of education are having fewer and fewer children while the less educated classes are having more.  If we are to make an assumption that the people holding higher degrees of education have a tendency to being genetically prone to higher brain functions than the population that dropped out of high school, which I would say is probably a fair conclusion to draw, we can rationally see how the proportion of children without the genetic tendencies toward intelligence would increase.  Over time this should mean a dumber population.

Some people over time have claimed that the answer is in eugenics, where we form institutions with the purpose of forcing the population to be a certain way.  Hitler borrowed this idea from Friedrich Nietszche, which resulted in the Holocaust.  Other, less radical eugenic ideas involve sterilization of people with autism, mental retardation, down syndrome, or who are too aggressive and to not allow gays, lesbians, or people who can't naturally conceive to artificially have children using their DNA.

The argument for eugenics against allowing kids with diseases that probably have some sort of genetic root, like autism and retardation, is that in nature they would be far less likely to survive, and also far less likely to attract a mate.  They say that today's society is too approving of people with these diseases having kids and of the notion that every kid is born special.  Another argument I heard for Eugenics, particularly of gays, lesbians, and people who cannot naturally conceive, is that in nature these people wouldn't naturally conceive, so nature has made them evolutionary dead ends.  While I think evolutionary "dead end" is probably not accurate (not for politically correct reasons...explaining why would take too long and move me away from the topic at hand...), I understand what they are getting at.  I think the healthiest thing we can do as a species is allow ourselves to continue evolving as naturally as possible in our technology driven world.  However, eugenics is not a natural selection, it's an artificial one, so arguments for not selecting who is worthy to conceive or not aren't any better than our present situation. 

Now I'm not saying that people shouldn't use them, but I think that one of the largest reasons for the college educated population not having as many children as the high school drop outs lies in the invention of the condom.  Yes, it might be helpful in the prevention of diseases, but it has probably been the biggest hindrence to natural selection that humans have ever invented.  People can now have sex without having to worry much about pregnancy.  Natural selection doesn't revolve around people wanting to have kids.  It revolves around people having sex.  Our genes don't understand that sex leads to children, so our urge to have sex is what is supposed to create the children.  This does not occur with the use of the condom.  

Because the more educated have a tendency to be more focused on achievement, they may not be as interested in having kids.  Kids would be an interference on their careers.  So with the invention of the condom they are able to satisfy their sex drive easier without creating children so they can continue to increase their social status.  The less educated aren't as focused on their career.  The kids are instead a monetary problem, but they are less likely to be focused on it.  The fact that they didn't finish school, or didn't persue more education in college might be an indication that they are less likely to think things through.  This might make them more likely to have kids.  The result of all this seems to be a decrease in the number of genes that select for intelligence and drive for higher social status. 

My hard drive failed yesterday.  So I got a new one, which at 320 GB is more than 24 times larger than the one that failed.  I can't imagine ever using that much space!  And I'm using Seta now, so quite a good upgrade, both in space and in speed! 

So, I used Norton Ghost to upload my backup files onto my 2nd hard drive so I could use the new drive completely for storage.  What I didn't realize was that using a Norton Ghost image on my former slave/storage drive would completely overwrite all of the information I had on that drive.  So I pretty much just lost all of my files...again...  All of my new projects are gone.  I'm going to get my computer back onto Ghost after work and see if there is a way I can recover what I have just accidentally overwritten.  Methinks not, but it will really be worth a try.

Anybody know enough about Norton Ghost to tell me if this is possible? 

I haven't really watched the simpsons much over the last few years, but I saw an episode a few days ago that really put the age of the show in perspective.  The show began in 1989, but can be traced back to the Tracey Ullman show back in 1987.  Bart has been 10 thoughout the series, which means that originally he would have been born in the late 70s.  Homer is in his late 30s meaning he was probably born sometime in the early 50s.  However, it is now 2008 and nobody has really aged.  This means that Bart was now born around 1998 and Homer was born sometime around 1970.  In an episode in 1996 called "Homerpalooza", Homer is depicted as an old guy who knows nothing about the then current music movements of the early to mid 90s.  Instead he listened to a radio station called "the fossil" which played rock music from the 1970s.  However, in this newer episode they flashed back to a time before Bart and Lisa were born and it was set in the early 90s.  Homer was a grunge musician and Marge was a college student.  I know it's a cartoon, so they can bend the rules, but the fact that they are now able to depict Homer and Marge without kids in the 90s despite the fact that the first season was set in the 1980s and there oldest was 10 is really strange.  But I suppose that's what happens when cartoon characters become more than 20 years old. 

So listening to my morning radio show, "the Monsters in the Morning", I hear them talking about a girl fight in which a girl was beaten up by a group of cheerleaders for 30 minutes for posting some bullshit on the internet.  They were talking about how violence among women has increased significantly over the past few generations and how girl fights are far more brutal than guy fights.  They even cited formal boxing matches they would watch.  While male boxers would tend to talk a little trash, fight, and then shake hands and show honor and respect, women boxers would take the match personally and fight far more brutally then men do.  Is this a cultural trend due to an entertainment media that glorifies violence, or is this a biologically programmed response to something deeper?

Some people want to blame TV and video games for the increase in violence that we see in today's society, but I think this is too quick of a conclusion.  Violence and entertainment has long been a part of our culture.  "Loony Toons" and "Tom and Jerry" were well known in the 40s and were cartoons that glorified violence.  For decades kids would watch these shows, from the theater in the 30s and 40s to the TV screen as it made its way into every middle class household in the country.  Yet, even this violence marketed to such a young audience and the news programs showing the atrocities of the Vietnam War watched by there parents seemed to create violence on the magnitude of modern society, and certainly didn't add much violence to the female sex.  This problem seems rooted deeper.   

Men have always been more violent than women.  To understand why women are becoming more violent we need to take a look at why this is.  In many animals male violence has a lot to do with territory or social ranking.  This is true of human males as well.  Perhaps this has something to do with hormones, but I think in a lot of ways this is a psychological process, where the male brain develops neuro-pathways differently than females based more on a differing environmental stimulus.   

So what is the differing environmental stimulus?  I believe it to be the mother.  The primary care giver in a vast majority of species where care is given is the female.  One of the biggest contributors to maleness has a lot to do with the misunderstandings between the mother and her son.  As a woman has no experience growing up as a boy she has somewhat more of a disconnect between herself and her male children.  As a result, men tend to grow up being a bit more individualistic.  The result of this individualism is a brain wired to compete.  This understanding of competition and social heirarchy is only complemented when multiple male siblings, also wired for individualism and the dominance heirarchy, learn to compete with one another.

Mothers, however, have a greater connection and understanding of their daughters.  This will often develop the female brain for a greater understanding of empathy, social interaction, bonding, and emotional awareness, as these are more easily shared between mother and daughter.  This difference probably has a lot to do with why males have a tendency to take more risk than women.  It may also explain why the individualist male is more likely to be Republican and the social and empathetic females tend to lean more Democrat.      

So where does violence fit in here?  Unnecessary violence really seems to come from a childish lack of understanding how to restrain oneself.  In essence, it is a tantrum.  The adult/adolescent who was insufficiently taught to control him/herself at a younger age will be more likely to cause these violent acts.  Since boys don't develop as strong of a connection to the primary care giver, the result is that the boy has a greater chance of developing violent behavioral traits. 

With the number of duel income families rising, both boys and girls are given less attention by both parents.  This, I believe, is what has lead to an overall increase in violence in schools, and the now closing gap in violence between males and females.

But why are females so much more violent in fights?  This is likely genetic.  While men have evolved over millions of years with a smaller connection to their primary care giver, this is a newer phenomenon for females.  The result of this evolution has been a male understanding of the line between when fighting is genetically advantageous as a means of social dominance and when fighting isn't worth the energy.  Females have had far less evolutionary influence to understanding this concept.  So when females fight, they fight rough, without mercy, and without an understanding of when it is advantageous to stop wasting energy on the fight.    

That's enough said on this topic.  Later!  

I recently read an article about rape in the military.  Apparently it is more common for a woman soldier to get raped by her fellow male soldiers than it is for her to be killed in action.  In fact it was so common that something like 45% of women in the military reported being inappropriately touched and about 35% said they had been raped.  So the question is, why?  How could our heroes over in Iraq and Afghanistan do something so cold to the poor women serving beside them? 

I believe you'll find the answer lies in the history of war and rape.  The raping of women by men has been a part of war for a long time.  Groups like the vikings used to destroy foreign towns, kill the men, loot the city, rape the women, and even kidnap the best looking of the women.  Many civilizations would do similarly throughout history, conquering land and raping the women.

Looking at this from a sociobiological perspective, this behavior goes back to genes.  The biological purpose of life is basically to replicate our genes.  Therefore, the genes that make an organism most fit are those that help the organism survive and reproduce successful offspring.  Because the egg is less abundant than the sperm (a woman can only give birth every 9 months as opposed to a man who could have 100 children in 9 months if he wanted), women are more concerned with finding a quality mate who will add quality genes to her offspring, and/or will help to raise the child, giving the offspring a better chance of developing into a successful organism.  The male, able to rear as many children as he sees fit, is more concerned with quantity.  If he has 200 children, several of them are bound to be successful, even if he doesn't contribute much in the process of raising the children.  The more successful children a man or woman has, the higher the frequency of your genes in the gene pool. 

Let's apply this concept to men in war.  When men are at war, though the purpose may be political or economical, to the genes this is time to replicate.  You kill off most of the men, and perhaps even the children, and when your men have raped the women, the few male victims who survive won't be able to compete sexually for 9 months therefore increasing the genes of the conquering people while supressing the genes of the conquered.  Under natural circumstances this would mean a whole generation of children with half the genes of those who conquered.

Interestingly, the women being raped in this circumstance are not the "conquered" but are part of the "conquering" people.  Well, in history it was pretty rare for women to follow men into battle.  Genes don't know any different, they just do what they have evolved to do.  In this case, it's raping women when in war in a foreign land.  The genes don't know that the women serving beside the men aren't the "conquered" population.  They just know that when they are at war they get the urge to reproduce.  The result is the rape of a fellow military female.

Now it has been argued to me that the women in the military have a higher tendency of being promiscuous, and are therefore "asking for it".  I don't know whether this is true or not, but genetically it could make sense as well.  In times of long term high stress, such as in war, a women who is not caring for a child (as is the case with military women) will probably be more likely to sense her biological clock.  This might be conscious, as in she wants to have a child to make sure her genes get passed on before something bad happens to her, but more likely I believe it's probably subconscious, meaning that her body language or perhaps phermones or other sexual signal might subconsiously suggest to men to have sex with her.  She might not want it, but even if she is raped because of it if she has the child, as she would in nature, the child might be genetically "successful" in that by passing on genes that could make a male more likely to be a rapist, if she has a male he may end up raping several women who end up having more genetically "successful" children.   It's a sick way of looking at rape, but genetic success doesn't always have to be pretty, so long as the genes involved increase in frequency with each generation.

This issue of rape and conquering can even probably be traced back before humans by looking at the Gorilla.  A troop of gorillas usually consists of one silverback male, several females, and their offspring.  Males without any females try to conquer a territory and the females inhabiting it by defeating the troop silverback.  When a male successfully chases a silverback out of his territory and becomes the new silverback he kills all of the females infants.  This obviously stops the females from breastfeeding which brings the females back to their sexual cycles thus allowing the male to copulate with all of the females in his harem without any competition from the old silverbacks genes.  Ahhh...  The beauty of nature...

Just as a sidenote, I do not support rape of any kind, nor am I trying to defend rapists, I'm just trying to answer the sociological question of why this behavior happens so often.

Overall, a nice weekend.  Hung out with Tadd and PK where we played some Smash Bros Brawl, and a little bit of Beautiful Katamari. 

Played music and recorded a bit with Justin at my parents house.  The song is a bit more distortion oriented than my previous recordings.  I'm hoping to have the bulk of it finished by the end of the week, but you never know.  Sometimes I get fed up with a song and just scrap what I've done because I think it needs to be thought through better.  This one I think might be about ready, though.  The bulk part of the song is done, it just needs a few extra guitar parts, and, as always, drums.  It's also going to be missing the outro because I need drums to make it. 

Went back to hang out with Tadd, Heather, and Rick Saturday night and spent Sunday visiting my grandparents at the Villiages.  Played some pool and was shooting pretty well after the first few games. 

Not much more to really report.  I'm still unhappy, and as I don't want to make this journal too negative, I'd rather just not say too much about it.  I started this journal hoping that 2008 would be more positive.  Right now I'm too disappointed by people who claim to want to be friends, but refuse to reciprocate when I go out of my way to do something nice for them.  My sister said not too long ago that she is getting too old to deal with people like that.  I believe I am too.  Friendship is NOT one sided.

Red Sox opened their first game this morning at 6:00ET in Japan.  Daisuke Matsuzaka started the game off a little rocky giving up a couple of runs early.  We were behind for most of the game, but ending the ninth inning, a new guy, Brandon Moss, who was replacing an injured J.D. Drew, hit his first career homerun to tie the game up at 4 - 4.  Hideki Okajima, one of my fantasy baseball pitchers, finished up the ninth inning giving up 0 runs and earning the win for the game.  And I believe my other fantasy baseball player who was in this game, Julio Lugo, hit .500 for the day and ran in the final run to win the game in the 10th inning!  What a great game!  One more in Japan tomorrow!

Go Sox!!!  Die Yankee scum!!!