Plague of Violence: I think we're fighting our way to extinction.

I know I promised no more depressing posts, but there's nothing but depressing stuff to talk about. With ISIS determined to blow up everything and everyone from the Middle East to Tunisia and beyond, and mad people cutting off heads in France, I can't help thinking that we're fighting ourselves into extinction.

Religions for the most part haven't been exactly friendly. But then, that's their fault. Apart from Hindus, Jews and Sikhs, religions have always clashed. Christians eradicated "paganism" in France, England, Ireland, and most of western Europe; it's caused the Crusades because it though that was a sure-fire way of winning a one way pass to Heaven, and it has, on occasion, lashed out at Jews, mostly pre-1800 whenever something went wrong and the clever people of the time couldn't explain what it was. Islam, too, has given rise to bullying the Jews, as well as fighting Christianity at every opportunity. Most of this fighting has been over Jerusalem, which holds some or most of the important sites for Christianity, Islam, and - I have to point this out - their ANCESTRAL religion, Judaism. Christianity can certainly be called a descendant of Judaism - Jesus was, after all, a Jew.

But it's not just religion that we're killing each other over. Russia and America have been glaring at each other ever since 1945, both determined to be the biggest power in the world; China is almost certainly the same, North Korea is obviously the exact same, only more brash.

We will use any excuse to seize something we desire, with force if necessary. As Thomas More once said,

"War is an activity fit only for beasts, yet practiced by no beast so constantly as by man."

What exactly are we all fighting for? Survival, religious expression, economical safety? Sure, they might be good reasons, but I'd be more prepared to fight for survival than religion or the economy, since both are defined by the country which we live in. I think we use violence because of a breakdown in communication, and a breakdown in non-violence.

It's also due to a lack of respect - respect for other people, with other cultures, other religions, and other values to ours. As for me, I have always tried to live by this one tenet amongst others: I give the respect I get. Granted, I don't always live up to it, but purely because I'm less aggressive than others, so I tend to let disrespect slide a lot more than I should.

I think all the violence distorts what it's fighting for. Look at ISIS - they're fighting for their religious beliefs, and yet non-Muslims are beginning to view all Muslims as extremists, terrorists and murderers. I do not, of course, condone this view in any way - I try to judge every person I meet based on who they are and how they react to me. I'm simply paraphrasing Pope John-Paul II:

"Social justice cannot be attained by violence. Violence destroys what it intends to create."

What better incentive do we need to stop the damned fighting? Violence doesn't win you what you want, unless you're a psychopath, an extreme loner, or a vampire. It doesn't win you respect, or love, or wealth most of the time.

You earn the respect you give, you earn the freedom you give, and you can do that by being sincere in dealing with others. Bryant H. McGill, the last quote I'm going to give this post, is brilliant for saying this:

"One of the most sincere forms of respect is actually listening to what another [person] has to say."

Help! I'm in a modern life.

Modern life is a damned dangerous thing!
We're all getting stupider, teenagers are becoming cyborgs and I have no idea how to do anything modern, like getting a damned date.
Louis CK has said that women are incredibly brave to agree to dating men. It's true when, looking back at history, you realise that ever since the dawn of the human race men have been the number one threat to women.
And yet we still do it, ladies! Knowing that getting into a car, alone, with a man, is willingly knowing that statistically, you go to your death. And yet there's no "Dating for Dummies" handbook, or if there is, I'm desperately in need of one. Plus, there's probably several.

And here's where I have a little beef with magazines like Cosmopolitan, because they've probably misunderstood the question "How do we (women) get their attention?" So I'm going to rephrase this to "How do we get their attention WITHOUT BEING NAKED?" Granted, great looks or a fantastic makeup artist always helps, but I always think that that's not enough.
And so I kindly submit to the world a few ground rules about dating and socialising:

To all the men:
1) CUT OUT THE WOLF-WHISTLING, effective immediately. In case none of you have noticed, we're not birds. As such, whistling isn't going to get us to shed our feathers and flap into a nest with you.
2) Please don't say you're looking at our "necklaces". 9 times out of 10, you don't actually mean it. Women know you most likely don't mean it, but please feel free to take your eyes back!
3) There's no need to have a Chris Pratt or Hugh Jackman-esque body, or chivalry, boys! Chivalry is just a code for medieval bloodthirstiness, and I'd rather you had good manners and some idea of how to treat a woman well, although the whole good-looking body thing would be a bonus as well. Just be at least marginally better than OK in bed, and have that stupid line ready from Dirty Dancing.

To all the women:
1) For everyone looking for their Mr. Right, stop! Consider what his first name is likely to be and let's face it - he's going to be either Mr. Always Right and never shut up, or Mr. Never Right, in which case you'll end up walking all over him.
2) Calling all women who have tried any of the following: Losing a shoe, collecting cutlery underwater, eating poisonous fruit, sleeping for long periods of time, talking with teapots, running away from home only to be chased by men who thought you stole an apple, making friends with trees and raccoons, masquerading as a man in the army, growing your hair out, locking yourself in a tower, and moving to the bayou to start your own restaurant. If you've tried all of this and still aren't having any luck just give up, before you do something really embarrassing.
3) There's no need to have a J-Lo bum or Paris Hilton looks. As long as you're marginally smarter than Hilton, have a few tricks in the bedroom and a quote from your man's favourite TV series, then he will love you forever.

Just General Tips:
1) to every damn "know-it-all" out there - you're only getting on people's nerves. If you say you're a self confessed "know-it-all", then please understand: Unless your name is God or Google, you don't know it all. You're just annoying.
2) Once we hit teenagerhood, we all become fluent in three languages: our native language, sarcasm and innuendo. If a child is asking something you think they shouldn't know just yet, tell them they'll understand when they're a teenager.
3) Never "can" the sarcasm. It's far better when it's served up fresh. If it's stale, then I pity the person you're using it on.
4) Anyone who considers themselves a smartarse needs to consider whether they actually smart or not. Half the time, you're just an arse.

In the end, we need to take life with a large dose of humour. It doesn't matter if we don't meet The One and fall in love; with the number of humans on the planet, we need to dial down the rabbit level of breeding!
We also take life far too seriously. A world where newscasters say "Good Morning" or "Good Evening" and then tell you a million reasons why it isn't is a world where comedians should be worshipped as the Fountains of Happiness and the saviours of souls. But I absolutely agree with Mignon McLaughlin who described the three horrors of life and, I honestly believe that if you spend your life trying to avoid or prevent these three horrors, then yours is a life well lived:

"The three horrors of modern life: talk without meaning, desire without love, and work without satisfaction."

Never say anything you don't mean, never give into desire unless you're certain love isn't a factor, and never settle for a job you don't enjoy. That's just the basic way to survive and enjoy a modern life.

Mortality Music Part 3: Super Volcanoes

Ah, volcanoes: A cross between nature's spots and Mother Nature on her period. I said in the last post that I would cover volcanoes separately. This is purely because I've got a fair bit to say, and I will no doubt erupt into a particularly fiery rant, but there it is.
The most famous volcanoes all have the same thing in common: Mount St. Helens, Krakatoa, Vesuvius, Mount Tambora.
They were all very, VERY explosive eruptions. Krakatoa wiped itself off the face of the earth with the loudest noise ever heard. The Australians could hear it - from 2,000 miles away.
Mount St. Helens tore itself open in May 1980, killing 57 people and leaving the famous horse-shoe crater it has today.
Vesuvius, as we all know, left Pompeii, Herculaneum, and its peoples buried under ash for centuries.
Mount Tambora, erupting in April 1815, caused enough climactic abnormalities for 1816 to be dubbed the Year Without a Summer.

And yet, these are nothing to the havoc a super-volcano can cause. Far from creating a single year's worth of trouble, super-volcanoes can cause the Decade without a Summer. That's a volcanic winter ten years long!
But what are they exactly? Giant volcanoes, yes, but what makes them different? The technical definition is that a super volcano is any volcano capable of throwing out 1,000 cubic kilometres (240 cubic miles) of stuff in one sitting.
But there aren't just the massive calderas, like Yellowstone. There are also large igneous provinces, such as the Deccan Traps in India, and the Siberian Traps in the north. These are giant areas of basalt rock, laid down usually over millions of years from almost never-ending flood basalt eruptions (basalt is a type of volcanic rock).
But for the sakes of this post, I'll keep to the calderas we're all worried about. And here is where I'll get a bit ranty.

By far the best known super-volcano caldera lies under Yellowstone National Park; although mostly contained in Wyoming, it also stretches into Montana and Idaho. But that is just the park itself - the caldera is 50 miles long and 12 miles wide, or 80 km long and 20 km wide, according to research from 2013.
By the same research, this caldera has the potential to hold 4,000 cubic kilometres/ 940 cubic miles of "melt", although in 2013, this was only between 6 and 8% filled with molten rock. Despite believing that this amount of melt isn't enough to cause a super eruption, the caldera is still 2.5 times larger than scientists had originally believed.

BUT, Yellowstone is NOT the only super-volcano in the entire world. America isn't the only country with a fiery threat of doom grumbling beneath its feet.
There are a grand total of 6 super-volcanoes that are considered dormant or active in the world today, of which Yellowstone is only one. While America can't claim the privilege of having the one and only super-volcano, it DOES have the dubious honour of holding half of the world's super-volcanoes, being also home to the Long Valley caldera in east-central California (because being God's Etch-a-Sketch with the San Andreas just isn't enough) and the Valles caldera in New Mexico.
Elsewhere in the world, there is Lake Toba in Northern Sumatra, the Aira Caldera in Japan, and the Taupo caldera threatens all hobbits in New Zealand.

Of all of these, Aira has exploded most recently, at only 22,000 years ago. And to be fair, Yellowstone is considered to be one of the most dangerous of all super-volcanoes today, purely because it tends to have a cycle of a super-eruption every 600,000 to 800,000 years.
I'm sorry, but to say that just because it's been 640,000 years since the last eruption that Yellowstone is "overdue" is just ridiculous. Plus, super-volcanoes can give off "baby" eruptions. The last lava flow at Yellowstone was only 70,000 years ago! So I'd be more concerned for North America in about 170,000 years.
However, there is a super-volcano that dwarfs even Yellowstone. Lake Toba is the only super-volcano on earth that can not only be described as Yellowstone's big sister, but can also be seen from space.
When it last erupted 74,000 years ago, it ejected 2,800 cubic kilometres of detritus, and is thought to have killed off between 50 and 60% of the human population at the time (although the scientists are still arguing about this today).
To be honest, I'm not entirely worried about Lake Toba, Taupo, or the Aira Caldera. All have erupted within the last 100,000 years, and it takes at least that long for a super-volcano to get its spark back. Taupo last went off 26,500 years ago, and Aira went off much closer to today than that - so these two and Lake Toba are more likely to be sleeping for a few thousand years yet.
Yes Yellowstone is a potential threat today, but just because its alarm usually goes off around this time, it doesn't mean that Yellowstone is such a light sleeper.

Of more concern are Long Valley and the Valles calderas - Long Valley especially. Despite erupting 760,000 years ago, it gave off a swarm of strong earthquakes in the 1980s, as well as lifting 100 square miles of the caldera floor 10 inches. Then, in the 1990s, large amounts of carbon dioxide from magma below the surface began killing off trees in the Mammoth Mountain side of the caldera.
Scientists believe that this means that an eruption of some sort is years away at the very least, but more likely decades or even centuries. Valles Caldera is just as active today as well, heating thermal springs.
But both are still quite small for super-volcanoes. In their last eruptions, both threw out around 600 cubic km of ejecta - just below the 1,000 classification for a super-volcano, but still big enough to cause immediate difficulties for America, and climactic difficulties worldwide.

So as far as our apocalypse is concerned, yes super-volcanoes are a possible source for it to come from. But we have survived volcanism for at least 200,000 years, and our ancestors have survived it for the better part of 5 million years. The fact that we're so preoccupied with how humanity will end, it means that we run the risk of not enjoying our existence while we still can.
I mean, the dinosaurs were the top dogs for 160 million years, so there is absolutely no reason to suppose that we can't expect the same sort of winning streak. I suppose it boils down to something Khalil Gibran said:

"If your heart is a volcano, how shall you expect flowers to bloom?"

If we remain so concerned with how our world will end, by fire, by water, by events that are ultimately beyond our control, then we miss the beauty that is around us right now. This is the last depressing post for some time, I promise. Mount Depressive is dormant as of now!

Mortality Music: Part 2

This is a bit of a carry-on from the last post, and I promise this is as depressing and pessimistic as it will get (most likely.) Because there's been a lot of kerfuffle over how humanity will get snuffed out. Mayan prophecies, Christian prophecies, volcanoes, asteroids, blah blah blah.
But there are, as far I know, only four or so certifiable ways that humanity will end up facing its own demise. Each one is just as likely as the next, although some may be more so than others, and all are probably more realistic than what we see in movies. Frankly, I'd sooner believe the world being killed off by the cast of TOWIE than Arnold Schwarzenegger, but that's just me.
And we start off with the most likely: 

1) SUICIDE BY WMD
I wish I was joking. Nuclear bombs are the first technology that could render humanity extinct by choice. In contrast, the dinosaurs had nothing to stop the KT asteroid from crashing into earth like a game of Russian Roulette going horrexifully wrong (well done if you got that).
Granted, the fact that we aren't all radiation-mutated zombies by now means that this isn't as serious a threat as we think, since most governments can be trusted to show some self restraint.
But then there are also bioweapons and nanotechnology. While the latter is still far off, the former is serious enough for agencies like the Dept. of Defence in America to begin investing in vaccines. If and when bioweapons become a reality, anybody with a few million of their chosen currency and some top scientists can create it, and it only takes two ideologues to bio-terrorize the human race into infinity (and beyond!)

2) SUICIDE BY ACCIDENT
Some people might think "Really? Accident?" but then, isn't that what global warming is, really? True, it might not drive us entirely extinct, but we can never fully predict the consequences of a dramatic increase in CO2 in the atmosphere. Either way, global warming will have a big impact whatever it does.
Fuel shortage, economic collapse, massive crop failure, all of these could lead to humanity kicking the proverbial bucket. The economy's failed in the past, and can do so again, fuel shortages means tough luck getting food around the world, and more so when the food isn't even around.
An interesting one for me was "suicide by strangelet". This is basically where the scientist try to create something, and end up creating rabid were-bunnies with chlamydia. Granted, it's most likely where physics gets experimented on, because that could blow the entire universe to shreds, but it's still possible from chemists or biologists.
And then there's technological advancement, to the point where we end up replacing ourselves with computers. Great fun, right?

3) MURDER
Now this one surprised me. The first one, not so much, though, because we could always get bumped off by aliens. We've practically been shouting to the universe where we are with a century's worth of radio signals, we've sent them scraps of a culture from 20 or 30 years ago, and more importantly, we sent bits of DNA up there with it. We've basically handed aliens our weaknesses on a plate.
The alternative scenario in this category is a "Wrath of God" type thing, which can happen in one of two ways. Either God does exist and he throws a Noah's Ark style temper tantrum, or we don't exist except as a virtual existence "game" on a giant computer and the plug gets pulled. Frankly, I'd bet on God's temper.

4) NATURAL DEATH
Of all the ways we could go, some of the ones in this category are by far the most interesting. There are Gamma Rays, caused by gamma ray bursters or supernovae, which puncture the ozone layer and thus kill off a lot of terrestrial species. There's the whole existential "we don't exist" shtick, which I don't buy at all.
The three most likely are asteroids, pandemics or a super volcano, which I will try and cover in another post very, very soon. Asteroids are famous for knocking off the dinosaurs from their proverbial perch, and even though the chances of an asteroid getting us in the near future are incredibly low, we haven't charted many of the comets and asteroids that could hit home.
That said, there's as high a chance as 1/300 of an asteroid large enough for human extinction to hit us in 2880 (good luck being alive to see that!) On top of that, there are many nuclear capable countries who haven't got the tech to tell the difference between a nuclear blast and an intergalactic dump. So the asteroids could spark a nuclear war too.
And then, there are pandemics. I'm not really talking about bird or swine flu, although those could always cross the human barrier at some point; I mean pandemics like the Black Death, the bubonic plague. Since the Black Death killed off over 33% of the European population when it first appeared in 1348, and some strains of the Ebola virus have a mortality rate of 90%. Pandemics are not to be taken lightly, and I say this as a daughter of doctors.

And since I plan on covering volcanoes, super or otherwise, in my next post, I leave you with a Joel C. Rosenberg quote:

"We are living on the brink of the apocalypse, but the world is asleep."

Sixth Mass Extinction Event: Time to face the Mortality Music

So, we've entered the sixth mass extinction phase, according to a study by Stanford, Princeton, and Berkeley Universities, all in America.

There have been five so far, including the famous asteroid collision that knocked off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. While that is the best known, it wasn't the worst, having only killed off 65% of life alive at the time.
The absolute worst extinction event to date came at the end of the Permian era, famous for its Gorgonopsids, with the first sabre teeth; 96% of all life at the time died, leaving us descended from the 4% that survived.
While we can't ever be entirely sure what caused it, the Permian's Great Dying (no kidding - that's what scientists really call it) was, as most people believe, caused in two phases: Firstly, a massive eruption in Siberia, known today as the Siberian Traps. This was one of the biggest eruptions for the last 500 million years, lasting for 1 million years. This raised the land temperature by between 5 and 10 degrees, killing off most of the land animals.
The heat on-land also led to massive amounts of methane bubbles trapped in the oceans to be released, heating up the oceans and pushing global temperatures up even higher, and killing off large amounts of marine life as well.

While the extinction event today probably - hopefully - won't be as bad, it still won't be good by any standards.
400 species have gone extinct since 1900. That sort of disappearing act usually happens within nature over 10,000 years. There's no doubt that this extinction event has been brought on, perhaps sooner than it would have happened, by mankind, what with the Industrial Revolution, global warming and pollution, and climate change. This doesn't mean that we're all going to be dead before fish and chip lunches on Friday, like hell we are.
It just means that if we don't do something very, very soon - as in five minutes ago - then we might find it very difficult to bounce back from this as humanity has done from curve-balls thrown at us in the past. Granted, it will take a tonne of work, and there will be people throwing hissy fits, but it needs to be done. And even if we succeed, we're only putting off the inevitable end of our world. Walter Hagen, I think, gives fantastic advice on living life:

"You're only here for a short visit. Don't hurry, don't worry. And do be sure to smell the flowers along the way."

But Alan Ball sums up our reaction to mortality best:

"As a culture, we are not comfortable with mortality. We do not accept it the way other cultures do. We cling to youth, and we don't want to die. And it's like, 'Well, too bad. We do'"

Some day, humanity will go the way of the dinosaurs, despite our superiority complex. We do have one, thinking that because we're at the top of the food chain, we're invincible. But someday we'll fall off our perch, most likely because we've cut it down ourselves and nature doesn't care, something else will take our place. We can only hope to have a similar run to the dinosaurs, if not longer.

Stupidity: A great test in self-control

I mentioned a few posts ago that one of the things I hated with a true passion was stupidity.

Before I go any further, though, I have to say to any national security-associated agencies that any murder or serious crimes discussed here are purely theoretical. I am not about to go on any murderous rampage or crime spree.

My problem is that there are a lot of stupid - or at the very least superficial - people who are considered role models.

The cast of shows like TOWIE, MIC, Jersey and Jeordie Shore, are just some of them. How is it that a man who can't even tell the time has become a household name in the UK? This same man should be kept in primary school until he can one, tell the time, and two, talk without an accent that makes me want to stuff my ears with nitroglycerin and a lit match.

My other pet hate is Katie Price, AKA Jordan. This woman is famous for only two things: 

A) her unholy obsession with pink.

B) Her tits,

And frankly, I have no interest in either. I've heard people say "Oh, but she's a fantastic businessperson!"

Yeah, well, so is Sir Alan Sugar, and he didn't have to get his dick out to become a fantastic businessman!

Katie Price and the cast of TV shows like the ones I've mentioned above should disappear, because they'll be responsible for a generation of brainless bimbos and whores. They'll spawn a generation who have unhealthy obsessions with big boobs and perverted sex, but think that electricity is caused by fairies farting on the National Grid.

If I were a total pessimist, I'd say they are, single handedly, the most probable cause of the Apocalypse and the extinction of humanity.

But I'm not going to rant only about famous cases of stupidity. I'm also hateful of the everyday kind of stupid people, who turn up on Jeremy Kyle surprised that unprotected sex leads to legions of unwanted, if not only unexpected babies.

Here's where I absolutely WISH, with all my heart, that forced time in a monastery or a nunnery was a compulsory thing, because of the following:

1) Monasteries and nunneries are two ENTIRELY different places. Monasteries are for monks, or male nuns. Nunneries are women only places, but both place equal value on chastity. If anything, these places can teach more self control than health ed teachers screaming "DON'T HAVE SEX! IT'LL TURN YOU INTO THE HULK!" at teenagers through megaphones.

2) They are more than likely to teach respect for other people. I know that the Church has had a lot of stick for paedophilia, and Islam has had a lot more stick because of the nutters known as ISIS, but stupidity makes dicks of us all.

Please, PLEASE don't think I'm mistaking stupidity for ignorance, here. Stupidity is inherent, almost genetic. Ignorance can be fixed by locking the ignorant individual in a half decent, non-fiction library for a week with the relevant amount of food and water, and no access to the internet.

My other category for stupid people is people who take religion as an absolute truth. The kind of people like the Westboro Baptist Church who hate gays, soldiers, and just about everybody.

To these people I have two points to make. Firstly, you can't really hate gays when your Messiah had two dads, and turned out just fine. In fact, it can be said that you've made a bigger fuss of him for the last 2,000 years than you've done for gay people. Secondly, you're stupid if you think that gays, your Son of Man aside, are going to make shit parents simply because they can't have kids.

My evidence: all of the "good couples" who put their kids up for adoption. Let gay couples adopt all of the kids that are put into the system, and we might just prevent some crimes further down the line.

Secondly, if you've got such a big problem with soldiers, then go fight their battles for them. If you come back, and still have a problem with them, then maybe I'll actually stop thinking that your argument's a stupid one.

Because here's a nasty reminder for you: Religion has caused more than its fair share of wars, not to mention persecution. But I've already covered religion, and recently, so stupid religious people can step back out of the spotlight once again.

My point is, looks mean nothing if you have nothing to back them up. Granted, Audrey Hepburn is remembered almost entirely for her looks and her acting career. But I respect her enormously - no, she is my ROLE MODEL because she sacrificed her career for her as yet unborn children, became a UNICEF Goodwill ambassador, all after dancing ballet to collect money for the Dutch resistance during World War II, and even acting as their courier on occasion.

She was never a stupid woman, regardless of how often she was chosen for movie parts due to her looks. She was smart, she was capable, she was big-hearted, she was brave time and again in her life.

As Frank Zappa once pointed out:

"There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life."

Much as I hope both he and I get proved wrong, I fear all too much that he's right.

Nerd it like You mean it!!

So I've noticed that all my posts have been very serious at best, if not outright depressing. The only remedy is, of course, to talk about something less depressing, so naturally, it's time to talk about getting nerdy.

But I'm not talking about the stereotypes we have of nerdy people: The pasty-faced kid at the back of the class with the glasses, 15 different allergies and a science textbook superglued to his face.

And I'm not talking about the girls who pretend to be nerdy because they're wearing the thick-frame glasses with no glass in the eyes.

Because "nerdisms", as I call them, aren't all about stuffy scientists or fake glasses. Everybody has a thing they go all nerdy about. Take me, for example: A twenty-something woman who's nerdy about dinosaurs, volcanoes, prehistory and the Ancient Egyptians, although dinosaurs are basically prehistory. It's a running joke that I'll be over the moon when they find a dinosaur, in Egypt, next to a volcano.

But they already kind of did that when they found Spinosaurus Aegypticus: a carnivorous dinosaur found in Egypt, only with no volcano in sight (bummer), and yes, it's that dinosaur famous for trashing a T-Rex in Jurassic Park III.

Now, I'll stop myself from going into a lecture about dinosaurs, Egyptian or otherwise, to shout something at all the nerd-haters: It's OK to be a nerd. Calling someone a nerd isn't even an insult, even by today's standards; we just laugh, say "yeah, whatever" and walk away.

But there is this implication of nerds being anti-social at worst, awkward at best, and here is where my two absolute favourite nerds come in: My uncle, and my granddad. Both are somewhat nerds in the more traditional sense: Granddad was a chemistry buff, my uncle's a soon-to-be-retired theoretical physicist. Granddad managed to branch out to being a nerd in mnemonics, the English language, crossword puzzles, Sudoku and jokes, both dirty and clean; uncle worked on the Hadron Collider in Switzerland, and both are as sociable as the proverbial social butterfly.

So here's something for nerds around the globe to hear and remember: You are the coolest people in the world. Whether you're a nerd about physics or photography, sociology or salsa, technology or tequila, you show off your nerdism like you're on a catwalk for the nerding world.

And there is NO SHAME WHATSOEVER in being a nerd. Shout it at your parents - my dad would probably die if I did, but do it - shout it at your friends who fake it, shout it to the whole wide world, and then go back to nerding like you do best.

Granted, there are different kinds of nerds - science nerds, history nerds, fashion nerds, but my point is: Nerds are people who know stuff. Nerds will be in charge one day purely because they possess the know-how.

And it honestly doesn't matter if you end up losing friends over your nerdisms. Hell, I've forgotten almost all my friends from secondary school, mostly because they were evil. But my best friend in the entire world has known me for the better part of 15 years, and despite all my nerdisms, she puts up with it, and even joins in. But nerds are powerful people, as Peter Drucker rightly points out:

"Today, knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity and advancement."

So nerdy people, rejoice! You've got the knowledge, which means you got the power, with all the Bruce Almighty-ness that that implies! All I ask is that you ignore the people who say nerds aren't cool, and keep at it.

Hate Crimes - No place in our society, today or ever.

Dear GOD, America! When will you ever learn that hate crimes aren't cool?

Let's face it, the 2nd Amendment and all the lah-di-dah about Americans having the right to bear arms was always going to be a difficult amendment to control, but this isn't about bearing arms - whether mechanical or regular arms.

With the guy in Charleston, South Carolina, we see yet again that humans can be absolute shit-heads. I know I probably should watch my language, but I hate three things with a total and pure passion:

1) Racism

2) Hypocrisy

3) Stupidity

But for now, I'll only rant about racism. We're all the same red blood and white bone underneath, HELLO!!!! And when you consider that we all live or "originated" in different climates - dark skinned people from warm climates ergo they have dark skin so they lose the heat quickly - the only problem we have with each other is a cultural thing.

And here's the real kick in the teeth to all the racists out there - WE ALL CAME FROM AFRICA ORIGINALLY!!!!!!

Yep, you read me right - your ancestors from 200,000 generations ago (yeah, I counted, boohoo) were living in the Great African Rift Valley running from Asia, right down into South-Eastern Africa.

Granted, it could have been anywhere else: Africa was only a lucky winner in a game of continental chance. Even we as a species only got lucky because of India sailing north, crashing into the notch between the Middle East and Asia and creating the Himalayas.

This in turn caused some pretty wet weather called the monsoons, which stripped Africa, a pretty swampy jungle-y country at the time, of all the moisture in the air, and dried it out. Which mean most of the trees disappeared, and our tree-climbing ancestors had to come down to earth.

My point is, we all called Africa home for a period of time before anywhere else in the entire world.

And no doubt I'm not the first to say this, but African-American people, African-British people, African-whatever people, wherever they hail from - THEY AREN'T ALL BAD. And white people are just as capable of evil as anybody else. How do I know this? Well, if any racists out there have heard of Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Elizabeth Bathory, Vlad Dracula (No, not the fanged guy), then they know, like the rest of us, exactly what they did: They killed millions of their own people, WHITE people as well as black.

And here's the kicker, racists: All of the above were... WHITE!!! Shocker.

Even Dylann Roof Storm, the would-be mass murderer (I'm not trying to insult anyone, but mass murder to me is 20 dead people and above), admitted that he "almost didn't go through with" a planned rampage six months in the making because "everyone was so nice to him."

If anything, a racist murdering twat saying that about his victims should absolutely make any racist think twice about their perceptions of the human race, especially of those they are determined to hate.

I absolutely admit that I have been somewhat racist in thought. But racists are perhaps the existing proof of what Albert Camus once said:

"The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance. Good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding."

I hope the victims of the massacre at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina will rest in peace, and I am sure that the prayers and condolences of the enormous majority of the human race go out to their families, friends, and the members of their community.

Jurassic World - Dinosaurs are never coming back!

That's right, we may all be dino-demented, but I very highly seriously doubt Velociraptor Vacations are going to come to an island near you.

I will be the first to admit that I don't know much about palaeontology, and less about genetics (having the birds and bees talk was bad enough, OK), but I know enough to have an opinion.

SO, let's give the basics of how we get fossils today. Giant comet smashes into the Yucatan Peninsula off the coast of Mexico, and all the plants go "nope, can't take this shit" and spontaneously combust. No kidding, that's genuinely what scientists think happen because of the shock wave coming out of the impact site.
All the herbivores slowly die of starvation, and the carnivores live it up for a few months, maybe a few years, only they end up dying too. So all the dinosaurs end up in the ground, and the calcium, the stuff that makes up their bones, gets slowly replaced by rock. The dinosaurs, in essence, get stoned.

But what happens to the DNA? Well, as the bones become rock, the DNA gets eroded. It becomes as extinct as the dinosaurs it made. In all the time we've known about dinosaurs which is about 100 or 200 years, I've only ever heard of one example of dino DNA actually being found, and even that couldn't make more than Terry the friendly T-Rex dino ghost.
So, dinosaurs unfortunately or otherwise, are dead. For good. At least in my lifetime; Mother Nature may end up pulling a Lazarus the dead man on them.

But what about what came after the dinosaurs? It took about 10 or 15 million years for the dust to settle and by then, the mammals had taken over except for a brief period of man-sized birds ruling the proverbial roost.
But even those early mammals we can't bring back. Scientists reckon that the earliest animals we could conceivably bring back would be from between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago at the absolute farthest, and from 6,000 years ago at the absolute closest.
Which means all of the following are up for coming back: the dodos, mammoths, sabre tooth cats, ptero-birds, cave lions, woolly rhino, the giant elk Megaceros or Megaloceros, the giant ground sloths, and even our own ancestors from the earliest, the Australopithecus, right down to the Neanderthals.

Naturally, I'm as excited as anybody about this. But I think there are some we shouldn't really bring back. The mammoths I think shouldn't come back, because their history is so close to ours. They lived and died alongside us - hell, they were still alive when the Egyptians were building the pyramids (no, I'm not joking!).
I also think we shouldn't try bringing back any of our ancestors, simply because it'd be too confusing: modern humans living alongside the first noticeably human like apes? Gads, it's a headache in the making.
That being said, I can understand bringing back a few of each hominid species for research purposes. Call it cruel, but then curiosity often is. I suppose this is basically summed up by Toba Beta's warning:

"[The] Prehistory of mankind is way too horrible to be remembered. But if we choose to ignore it, then we'll be doomed to repeat it."

And that is basically why I'm a fan of prehistory. At some point, we're doomed to drop a few notches on the food chain. Like we were in prehistory.

ISIS - Why religion has gone wrong

OK, first things first - I in no way hate religion, or religious people. Yes, I am an atheist, but because I always felt like I had religion, particularly Christianity, forced down my throat. But this is not why I hate ISIS or, as it's known now, Islamic State.
Before I go on, I have to say that just because I hate ISIS, doesn't mean I hate Islam as a whole. There are many people that I have met over my life, plenty of whom have been, openly or otherwise, Muslim, and have never given me offence, given any reason for me to be offended, or had cause to be offended by me while we knew each other.
In fact, it would probably be better for me to say I hate the extremism PORTRAYED for the moment by ISIS. Before ISIS, it was Al-Qaeda, but now it's ISIS.

Now, as usual, I will try and define ISIS in basic terms. Within Islam, to my knowledge, there are two faction that are more often than not at loggerheads with each other: Sunni Islam, which is the main branch of Islam, and Shia Islam.
Shia Muslims believe that Mohammed's cousin and son-in-law Ali became his successor in the Caliphate, or Islamic government when Mohammed died, whereas Sunni Muslims accepted Mohammed's father-in-law , Abu Bakr as the first Muslim Caliph, or President/ Prime Minister. Now of the two, Sunni Islam is the more "popular", with Sunni Muslims making up 87-90% of the world's Muslim population in 2009.
ISIS is part of what's known as the Salafi movement, which is part of Sunni Islam, and is, as far as I can tell, has a strict and puritanical approach to Islam. At the risk of being totally ignorant, it's a bit like the beef between Catholics and Protestants during the reign of Henry the 8th, only for Islam. They just don't like all the fancy frou-frou bells and whistles of worship.


But I don't have a problem with what Islam and ISIS stand for. After all, they're going through a difference of opinions; nothing that Christianity hasn't done before.
What I DO have a problem with, though, is that ISIS is trying to force their religion on anybody and everybody they come across, and anyone who tells them to feck off and do one is immediately branded an infidel and bumped off.
My even bigger problem with ISIS is their determination to destroy anything and everything that is pre-Islamic in the Middle East and the entire world, like their threat to destroy the Tower of Pisa.
I loathe anyone who denies any part of history. People who say the Holocaust didn't happen, I loathe. Idiots who believe the world is only 2,015 years old, I loathe, although I'll admit that idiocy happens. I'll have to live with that. What I really struggle with is why ISIS has to destroy history because it doesn't fit with religion.
And the reason I struggle with it is, ironically, because of the odd bits of history that I do know. Like the fact that, despite the bloody history between Christianity and Islam, the Ottoman Turks managed to conquer parts of Eastern Europe up to Transylvania (where they had their plans buggered by a particularly bloodthirsty prince Dracula - can't think who he is!).
Besides conquering Christian territory, they didn't give a damn about religion. All they really asked for was taxes, tributes, and soldiers for more wars. At a time when violence was a more visceral and up-close part of life than it is today, they afforded as much religious tolerance as they could give, and that was that.


I highly doubt that ISIS will stop destroying their own history. I have no doubt, though, that they will eventually regret it, and I dare to hope that they will pay the price for it. After all, in the last 10,000 years or so, we've gone through countless religions, from believing there are gods in all forms of nature, to believing in gods with animal heads, to monotheism.
Only whatever gods are out there know what we'll be believing and worshipping 10,000 years from now. But 10,000 years from now, history will be just as priceless as it is now. Because it makes sense of the world we have now. Religion is just a security blanket for what may or may not come after we close our eyes for the final time.
With all the religious disturbance going on today, I'm put in mind of something wonderful that H.L. Mencken said, and something that I try to live by now that I'm non-religious. I'm not religious because of two reasons:

1) I refuse to believe, or continue to believe, in any and all religions that ask us to kill each other for their own gain. Granted, this is exactly what ISIS is guilty of today, but Christianity has been just as guilty of it in the past, in the Crusades, and in its persecution of the Druids and the "pagans" of Ireland and Britain.
2) For centuries, religion has tried to pigeon-hole the population into its own definitions of how to live a "good life". For me, that is basically intrinsic in have a sense of morality. I have my own moral code, thanks, and that is summed up in three words: Compassion, Tolerance, Empathy. 
I will give the respect that I get, and it is that sentiment that H.L. Mencken expressed so wonderfully for me:
"Morality is doing right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right."
Yes, there might be a God waiting for me when I die. And I will more than happily tell him as much to explain why I haven't believed in him. But the chances are he doesn't exist, or he isn't alone. Either way, more than one someone is going to lose out on that bet. And where religion has gone wrong is living up to Jesus Christ's basic tenet: Do unto others as you would be done by.

So I have no love of ISIS because, despite fighting and killing and committing war crimes in the name of Islam and Mohammed, they aren't really fighting for his principles, as he said in his final sermon:
"All mankind is from Adam and Eve; an Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab nor a non-Arab has any superiority over an Arab; also a white has no superiority over black nor a black has any superiority over white except by piety and good action."

So ISIS can call me an infidel and a non believer and an apostate all they want. Until they live up to their own Prophet's principles and words, I can only respect the Muslims that live up to Mohammed's request for "piety and good action".

Brexit: Should the UK bugger out of the EU, or buck up?

OK, so - this has been in the news a bit recently, but I think not many people quite or fully understand why the UK's membership of the EU is so important. A great reason for me to step in and explain it in layman's lingo.

So, the European Union is a politico-economic union, of 28 countries in and around Europe (obvious, I know!). Basically, it's 28 countries, including the UK getting together for free trade between each other and "communal politics", for want of a better turn of phrase.
As it says on the EU's website: "The first steps were to foster economic cooperation: the idea being that countries who trade with one another become economically interdependent and so more likely to avoid conflict... a huge single market has been created and continues to develop towards its full potential."

But since its creation as the European Economic Community in 1958, the EU's become more political than economical, hence the name change to the European Union as more countries have joined, and it's acknowledged that, admitting to have "evolved into an organisation spanning policy areas, from development aid to environment... The EU is based on the rule of law: everything that it does is founded on treaties, voluntarily and democratically agreed by all member countries."

But we're not interested in what the EU's about. This is about whether or not we want to stay in the EU, and the first thing that comes to mind is the COST of being a member of the EU club.
Now, Nigel Farage claimed that membership was costing us £55 million a DAY, to the tune of approximately £20 billion a year. Now, if this was the case, then we'd have every right to demand a discount considering the economical blackhole every country's trying to plug.

But, while it's fair enough to describe our contributions to the EU as a "membership fee", this actually doesn't exist. Yes, there is NO SUCH THING as an EU membership fee. Instead, again from the EU's website, the funding for the EU is made up of three main sources:

1) A percentage of gross national income. This is a small percentage, estimated as "usually around 0.7%", and "contributed by all EU countries [as] the largest source of budget revenue".

2) 0.3% of standardised value-added tax or VAT revenue, from each EU country, and

3) A large share of import duties on non-EU products, although "the country that collects the duty retains a small percentage".

So, the amount we pay to the EU does vary from year to year. And Farage was right about us paying £55 million a day - though that's the figure from 3 years ago. In 2012, we paid about £20 billion to various EU institutions. But on balance, we usually pay on the order of £12 billion a year - or, in Farage's terms, £33 million a day. And what he forgot to mention was that, through rebate, we DO get some of that money back, which means we technically pay less.

Another reason Cameron is trying to renegotiate our treaty with the EU, though, is that they're being incredibly pushy on what we can and can't do politically.
According to the Daily Mail (no, I don't read them all the time; trying to get a broad range of sources, here!), some of the areas he's trying to renegotiate are:

1) Workers from the EU - "no in work benefits [or] social housing until they have been in Britain for 4 years, [and] no child benefits or tax credits paid for children living outside the UK"
2) Unemployed EU migrants - "No support from the UK tax-payer, [and] deportation if they do not get a job after six months."
3) "Impose restrictions on EU migrants bringing in family members from outside the EU. Longer bans on rough sleepers, beggars and fraudsters returning to the UK [and] tougher rules on deporting foreign criminals, [as well as] refusing to allow other countries to join the EU without imposing controls on the movement of their workers until their economies have reached UK levels."

Now, apart from that last point, most of this applies to our every day lives directly. And it's fair to say that renegotiating is a good thing - if there's something to be gained. And Cameron clearly thinks there's a fair bit to be gained.
And I think that the EU needs to back off just a bit. It was created for economical support, not for deciding how green our vegetables need to be, or how big rhubarb has to be before it gets imported and exported and all of that.

Plus, it can't really penalise the UK for having a fast growing economy when countries that actually use the euro - anyone thinking of Spain, Greece or Italy? - are practically sliding down a slippery slope labelled "DEBT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
Basically, the UK isn't really technically part of the EU. I'm not just talking geographically - did anybody notice the Channel, even if we're still sitting on the Eurasian tectonic plate - and we're kind of renowned historically for the biggest middle finger to Europe when a certain fat king told an old man in a dress he'd marry whoever he damn pleased.

I'm just saying that we're a bit too separated from the EU for the EU to turn into a bossy, overprotective mother. And, for all you people who want to check my facts, here's the guys I "talked to":

https://fullfact.org/economy/cost_eu_membership_gross_net_contribution-30887

http://europa.eu/index_en.htm

 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3106092/Cameron-use-referendum-permanently-dock-Britain-Brussels-claims-EU-chief-Jean-Claude-Juncker.html#ixzz3bzu2aT8x 

The Political Puzzlement: King Cameron!

So, I've been  wanting to talk about the shocker that happened earlier this month for weeks. I am, naturally, talking about the election that had Cameron doing the conga all the way back into No. 10.

Before I do, though, I want to clear something up for people by defining what everyone was expecting to happen, which is a hung parliament. This isn't some stupid form of suicide, or silly slang about how many dicks are in power, but it IS what happens when no single party gets the accepted majority of 326 seats. 
In this election, the Tories managed to boost their seats from 306 to 330, in the middle of the SNP pulling a power version of William Wallace from Labour in Scotland, and the Lib Dems and UKIP getting slaughtered through the whole thing.

I can't help thinking that this is an amazingly good thing. 

Firstly, the UK's borrowing has come DOWN. In March of this year, it was calculated that borrowing for the 2014 - 2015 year was £87.3 billion. Now, that might not sound particularly great, but hold your horses.
The independent Office for Budget Responsibility had calculated that the borrowing for the same year would be £90.2 billion. So not only has it comfortably undershot the estimates, it is also £11.1 billion less than the deficit of the year before.
Now, I'm no great mathematician, and economics and business studies is like handing me the riddle to the universe. But you would think that anyone that could pull that out of a hat of spending cuts, is worth keeping in power for another five years!
On top of that, the deficit was calculated as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product or GDP. Can I please just point out that, in 2009 - 2010, borrowing was up to an all time, atrocious high of £153 billion - 10% of the GDP!!! Since the coalition took over in 2010, that has come down over half to 4.8%. Now to be fair, that's not even nearly enough. But it's far better than leaving the finances anything like they were.

Secondly, let's take a look at the other side. The Lib Dems, unfortunately, have everything in the political system of the UK working against them. They're only around to give the public a third choice, and very few people take them seriously. UKIP is so focused on immigration that they barely have any policies for anything else.
And Labour... oh, dear. Why oh WHY would anybody want this party in power when key figures in their hierarchy have said that they don't think they did anything wrong economically in the run-up to the 2010 election.
Plus, this is the party that knocked up the Ed-stone. WHY? Why put your policies on an eight-foot tablet, when a) your policies can and probably will change, and b) it's bad enough your leader looks like a character out of Wallace and Gromit!

Basically, the economy needs to go through fat-camp -  a very, very thorough fiscal diet, and I can't help thinking that the Conservatives are the only party that can put the economy through that kind of boot-camp.