Bah. I do not feel like blogging right now. That is happening a lot lately, especially when I have to blog in the afternoon because I am planning on being social in the evening. Maybe it’s a function of getting more in touch with my emotions and thus feeling things a little more strongly (yay!).

Or maybe it’s just because it’s the summer and summer makes me feel lazy, as well as making it uncomfortable hot in the afternoons and hence no fun for writing.

Either way, blogging is the thing I do, so here I am, blogging away for you nice people.

On the personal front, I just finished sending off my writing samples and my pitch to VFS, so once I get my BCID renewed and shoot them a picture of it, my application will be complete.

That’s going to be a pain, because of course, ICBC is not open on Sundays, and so I will have to find my way to their office in Lansdowne Mall on 3 road some time during the week and hope I can convince them via my CareCard and whatnot that I am who I say I am and they should really give me a new ID so I can go pursue my television writer dreams.

I am pretty sure I won’t have to pay for it. It was a long long time ago that I got my first BCID (it’s like a driver’s license for ID purposes but doesn’t let you drive) but I am pretty sure that the nice lady behind the desk said that the first re-issuance is free.

I guess they assume that anyone can lose it once.

But even if I have to pay again, I will do it, of course. Hell, I have already paid VFS their $50 “application fee”, or as I like to think of it, the “ha ha ha, we hold your dreams in our hands and can juice you for whatever we like” fee.

I mean really. Like it ever cost $50 to process a form. (And from what I have heard, that is actually quite low by industry standards. ) Even in the bad old days of carbon copies and paper filing, the labour and materials were $20, tops. And in this day and age, it costs next to nothing to process my ONLINE application form and attached writingses.

So it can’t be seen as anything more than a bogus money-grab. It’s not like if applying was free, hordes of miscreants would file bogus applications and waste the school’s time and money just for fun.

And even if that was a possibility, a fee of just $5 would probably be enough to discourage it.

But anyhow, that ranting about the general malfeasance of learning institutions aside, I am very keen to dot my tees and cross my eyes on the application process. Not only am I super keen about the Writing For Film And Television program in general, once the application is in, I can start pursuing funding.

Good news on that front : it looks like I will be able to bridge the gap between student loan and tuition from the funding for the disabled alone. There is a section for disabled students right on the BC Student Aid websites, and the funds from that section add up to a potential $3,800 or so, and that is more than enough to cover the gap.

And that’s just the standard stuff. Who knows what else I might be able to find out there? I might end up not needing the full student loan, and that would mean less money to pay off in the future.

So, w00t on that.

No real progress on the “finding a new place” front. I found a place that does three bedroom townhouses for $1500/month, and that is a possibility. I assume by “townhouse” they mean “tract housing”, or as the Brits call it, “semi-detached”.

I assume this because they mention a big back yard in the ad, and that is a pretty hard thing to add to your usual apartment. I don’t really care about big back yards, especially if they are communal (my idea of a proper back yard includes a ten foot privacy fence), but renting a townhouse might be a good compromise between an apartment and a house.

I would have to see the place first to see if it had that elusive feeling of living in a house.

$1500/month would mean $500 apiece, which is $100/month more than I am paying now. I can handle that without much of a problem. I could probably do $600/month if the place was nice enough.

Of course, I don’t know what the rent limit for people on provincial disability is. For all I know, a raise in rent would result in a raise in how much they give me for shelter and hence not cost me a thing.

That would be nice.

It really sucks that these two highly stressful things – pursuing education and getting evicted – are happening at the same time. Plus my sister will be visiting in a couple of weeks. STRESS!

Oh well, at least the education thing has an end point. Assuming that they accept me as a student (and why wouldn’t they? I’m awesome!), and I secure the student loan et al (ditto), the process will lay dormant until at least September and I can concentrate on other things.

Like not ending up homeless.

I might also look into whatever legal challenges to this eviction we might have. If Wall, the company that owns this place, is trying to pull a fast one here, I would love to be the one who pulls their tail about it and tells them “Not so fast, you corporate slumlords!”.

On the other hand, the commute to and from VFS every day is going to be kind of a bitch. In theory, I should look for lodgings closer to Gastown (like, in the DTES), but bleh. I don’t wanna!

Long commute, or life in a residential hotel, ALONE. Hmmm.

Oh well. Talk to you again tomorrow, folks!

We need to make room in society for selflessness.

Let me explain.

First, a definition : when I speak of selflessness, I do not mean the impossible ideal set by some religions of acting completely out of concern for others. That is a ridiculous notion. Every action done by every human being ever has been, is, and will be done out of the selfish motives of pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain. Whoever you are, whether you are a hedge fund managers living a life of self-indulgent excess that would make Wolf Of Wall Street look like Mister Rogers or a foreign aid worker risking life and limb to bring food and medicine to refugees in some godforsaken malarial swamp, you are doing what you do because you think it will make you happy.

Like I have said before, all motives are equally selfish but not all selfish motives are equal.

Rather than that outmoded definition, when I speak of selflessness, I mean the desire to devote oneself to something wholeheartedly, without one’s personal interests taken into account. This can be as concrete as being an emergency room nurse or as evanescent as wanting to follow a beautiful dream with all your heart. The unifying factor is that you are not primarily concerned with what are normally considered personal concerns.

Modern society pays a lot of lip service to this concept, but does not truly value or understand it at all. When someone is selfless, or has selfless desires, we treat them as weird. It violates the universal assumption of selfishness that is inherent in individualism.

Individualism assumes that we are all primarily looking after our own interests, and a society built upon this bedrock maximizes things like personal autonomy because those are the sort of things that make sense from a solely individualistic point of view and require no sense of any structure greater than a single person.

We have built our society around individualist assumptions. We all want freedom, we all want creature comforts, we all want a chance to self-actualize, and so on. This is a very solid foundation for a free and equal society, but it only goes so far.

For one thing, it does not include any idea of community. It doesn’t exactly preclude it either. Instead, it creates a massive blind spot towards it, and it is this exact blind spot that creates the problems with the sense of community and connection that plague modern society.

Modern society insists that everybody could and should be sufficient unto themselves. We are all expected to take care of our own needs, and only rely on others when it is absolutely necessary. A desire to help others is valued in the abstract, but unless fully focused into certain career paths, it is considered mildly socially embarrassing, and because we are products of an individualist society, when someone expresses a strong desire to help others outside of the topic of career paths, we don’t know what to say. We react either as if the person was bragging, or as if they had just confessed some minor social failing.

Above all, the individual is not allowed to say that they don’t care what happens to them, or that they are not really concerned about themselves as long as they get to help others. Even if placed within the matrix of individualistic thinking by saying helping others is what you enjoy the most, it still makes people uncomfortable.

We are simply expected to be primarily about ourselves and only secondarily about others. Even when we are praising things like romantic love and family, we lack the vocabulary to express it beyond a vague sense of “belonging” or “being part of something bigger than oneself”.

And old-time virtues like duty and dedication make no sense in a modern context. We have successfully severed all times with all the institutions that used to make us feel connected and complete, and replaced them with…. nothing.

The result? A quiet but deadly spiritual apocalypse, a black plague of the soul eating away at the public consciousness, resulting in record amounts of depression, substance abuse, extremist violence, and a pervasive feeling of absence and loss that people don’t even have the vocabulary to express outside of a feeling that there is “something missing”.

The truth is, while all human beings are individuals and should be treated as such, we are individuals of a highly social species and that means that treating ourselves and one another as if we were only individuals and nothing more is worse than futile, it’s massively counterproductive. If the goal is to maximize individual happiness and self-actualization, then our non-individualistic needs must be taken into account.

And a good first step towards that is to make it not just acceptable but understood when someone wants to dedicate themselves to something outside their personal needs and desires. We need to spread the idea that it is perfectly normal to want things like community, meaningful labour, someone to care for and about, and the company of like-minded individuals.

All of these transpersonal needs should be as publicly acknowledged and accepted as universal and normal as our more personal needs for love, sex, money, and status. If we could all just learn to accept that we all have emotional needs outside the tidy little cages of our modern lives, we could begin to turn our society into a happier, more stable, more mature, and above all more complete way to live that leaves nobody behind simply because they seem to “have it all”.

If you “have it all” according to society’s standards, and you are still unhappy, the fault lies not within you but within society’s very limited and blinkered concept of what people need in order to have a happy life.

We cannot find our way to a better way of life unless we lift our heads out of our personal feeding troughs and see the light on a distant horizon that is calling our name.

And that’s my thought for the day, offered free of charge, just because I want to make the world a better place.

Not that I am bragging.

Talk to you again tomorrow, folks!

Brace yourself, for we are about to take a journey into the dark recesses and bizarre grottos of one of my weird little intellectual obsessions. Make sure your seat belt is buckled firmly around your assumptions and please make sure to keep your thoughts and ideas inside the vehicle at all times.

One thing that really bothers me is just how random and arbitrary character and personality is. The very roots of identity and what we think of as ourselves are mere accidents of fate, no more in our control than the movement of the stars.

We are an assemblage of happenstance.

Take genetics, for example. Nobody knows exactly how much of our personality is determined by our genetic makeup, but modern science has been moving in the direction of “more” for decades now, and so it is safe to assume that it’s more than a little bit and possibly as much as half.

And we have absolutely no say in that. We don’t even ask to be born in the first place, but even when we are, we are given a random assortment of genetic traits over which we have no control.

No matter how badly you want to be a big beefy linebacker, if you are born into a slender petite body, it is never going to happen. You might control your allergies with drugs, but you can’t ever get rid of them. Maybe you would rather not have been born ginger, but ginger you are.

And it’s entirely possible that every single one of your personality flaws, like a too-quick temper or a tendency towards overeating, was genetically determined the moment egg met sperm, when you were a mere zygote.

But it goes far beyond the genetic. Even after we are born, we have little choice in who we become. So much of what we call “nurture” is beyond our control too. It’s down to accidents of birth. The parents you are born to, the place they live, the culture you are born into, the nutrition you get, the school you go to, the weather patterns… all of these things have an effect on who you become and we have no choice about any of them.

And then there is the question of taste. And I am not just talking about whether you like chicken or beef. The question of preference goes far deeper than that. It can be something as broad and pervasive as one’s sexual preference. We never get to choose what we like, all we can do is find out, whether it’s something as small as what we order off the menu or something as broad and deep as to what career path we take based on what we like to do.

Viewed this way, it really seems like what we laughingly call ourselves is just a scrapbook full of random events walking around claiming it’s a person. In modern society, we place a great deal of emphasis on our individuality and individual responsibility. We tell each other that we can be whatever we want to be, and hold people responsible for not just what they do, but who they are.

Yet how much control do we really have over who we are?

I first began contemplating this issue in reference to sexual imprinting. Random childhood and/or teen year incidents can determine a person’s entire sexual destiny, whether it’s something as simple and innocuous as an early sexual encounter leading to a lifelong preferences for redheads, or something as potentially devastating as child sex abuse leading to a lifetime of pedophilia and the resulting shame, guilt, and paranoia.

Nobody asks for the sexual imprinting they get. It just happens, usually at an age when society supposes us not to be sexual at all. You can choose what you act on, and how you satisfy yourself, but you cannot simply choose to have an entirely different sexuality from the one you ended up with.

And it goes on and on. Did you choose to be good at the piano? Or did you just find out? Did you decide to love hot and spicy foods? Did you ask to be an introvert? Who decided you would be easygoing?

I am not denying free will. Free will is evident in all we do and all we think. We have no choice but to believe in it. Like I said, we might have no choice in who we become, but we choose what we do, and that will never change.

But while law must treat all actions equally, I think it behooves us to ask ourselves whether all choices are equally easy to make. No matter what it is about yourself that you take pride in, it might be that those choices were easier for you to make than for someone else. Likewise, it might be that your worst traits are something you had no choice over.

And all of that really bug me. It seems so unfair and arbitrary than we just end up with the personalities we end up with largely due to fate. It makes me question my own identity and makes me wonder if life is a crapshoot after all.

Luckily, I have also begone to believe that it is possible to change yourself. That the choices you make now become part of who you are in the future, and that if you are willing to take control of the process and make your choices with the future self you want to be in mind, you can change who you are by changing what you become.

Therefore, every little act that expresses the person you want to be is important. Every choice you make that represents the person you want to become pushes you towards that very goal. No positive action is wasted.

And all you have to do to change who you are is to keep making those positive choices.

It’s not a matter of a permanent act of will. There’s no such thing. It’s a matter of slowly pounding yourself into a new shape, which will then naturally become the easy and natural thing to be.

Wish me luck in refashioning myself into a far superior version of myself!

Talk to you again tomorrow, folks.

Holy crapcakes, what a day.

Let’s see. We shall start with the fridge.

Our fridge has been dying for months, and lately, it got to the point to where it was hovering inches from death’s icy cold refrigerator door. So something had to be done.

We had tried to get a new fridge out of our landlord before, and he had always brushed us off with some promise of “next week” or the like. So when I called and left a message with Daniel the landlord’s wife, I expected it to be merely the first round of a long and protracted test of wills where I would have to make such a pest of myself (while remaining politely firm) that it would be clear to him that the only way to get rid of me would be to get us a new damned fridge.

That’s how it works, folks. People follow the path of least resistance. Make sure that path doesn’t go through you.

To my surprise, though, not three hours after I phoned, we got a notice slipped under our door telling us the new fridge would be here between 9 am and 2 pm today. Boffo!

Of course, that meant that we had to empty the old fridge, which is a pain, but we have a little mini-fridge as well, and that helped a great deal. Plus, we have some freezer packs and the thermos bags that go with them, and that helped too.

But mainly, Joe ended up cooking every single chicken burger we got, so we have like thirty fully cooked chicken burgers chillin’ in the new fridge right now.

Anyhow, I took it upon myself to be up for 9 o’clock to let the fridge guys in, and to empty the fridge. Joe woke up around then too, so both of us were up, and that’s when Thing 2 happened : Joe discovered that there was a leak in our main bathroom, right above the toilet.

I’ve heard of “it never rains, but it pours” before, but this was getting retarded.

Luckily, our landlord was able to come over right away and take a look, and he called a plumber, who arrived not long before the fridge arrived at 11:30 and stopped the leak. Such rapid response! Wow, this place is great.

Thing 3 happened when I finally got around to returning Sheena from VFS’ call. See, I had emailed her an inquiry about the Writing For Film and Television program they offer that I so very, very much want to do, and she had called back and left a voice message, and this was me returning the call.

She hooked me up with a very cool dude named Patrick who handles intake, and we talked about how to get me into the program and what to expect and such. He said that BC student loans will cover 16K of the 20K tuition for the program (yeah I know, ouch) and that I would have to get extra financing for the rest.

That doesn’t seem too impossible. I will have to dig around hard to find out what sorts of programs are available for people with disabilities entering secondary education in this province. I am willing to bet there is something out there.

I mean, it’s in the province’s best interest to get me an education that will land me a job and make me a taxpayer instead of a tax burden!

I’ve already submitted my application. I have to provide some extra stuff too, like a pitch for my dream project (skit comedy show, duh!) and two to four examples of my work (choices, choices!).

All that is no problem for me. I can write that pitch in my sleep (it’s only one page!) and I have a ton of work to send them, including Maple Leaf Menace, my hilarious short film about a HUAC-like committee investigating Americans for Canadian tendencies in order to fight creeping Canadianism.

Everyone who has read the script thought it was hilarious, so it’s clearly a lead work. I think it’s under twenty pages (that’s the max).. if not, I can snip.

The one sticking point is that they also want a scan or picture of my government photoID, and I don’t currently have one. I lost mine ages ago and have neglected to go get it reissued since.

Well now I have a good reason to go to ICBC and see if I can get the dang thing. I have needed it for ages, just kept putting it off. Plus, it is nice to feel identified.

So wheels are in motion there. Yay me.

Thing Four came when I was still all a-bubble with excitement over my VFS dreams being in motion, and I had come out to the main area to tell Joe all about it and general babble and gush, and Joe very politely listened to it all, then told me about Thing 4, which SUCKS.

Turns out, the bastards who run the corporation who own this apartment complex have decided they want to renovate this place and they have to kick us out to do it. Basically, it’s the classic situation where the owners want to upgrade the place and have to kick us low-rent bums out to do it. We are invited to move back in at the new “renovated” rent level, but I am guessing that is going to be beyond what we can afford.

We have until the end of August to find a new place. And as much as I hate moving, I hate apartment hunting more. The odds of us getting a place as good as this are very low. I am going to push for looking for a house to rent.

After all, if we have to move, we might as well move to someplace nice. We might have to take on an additional roommate or two in order to make it work, but dammit, I want to live in a house with an upstairs and downstairs again!

Oh, plus we have a rat loose in the apartment, Joe’s union is on strike and so he’s not getting paid, and the numb feeling in my leg goes all the way down to the ankle now.

Everything is happening at once. I am maxing out the stress chart now.

Oh well, if it swells, ride it. Time to surf the surge to glory!

Talk to you again tomorrow, folks!

As I seem to be on a roll with the anti-atheist stuff (I myself am an apathetic agnostic), I thought I would take the time tonight to talk about the adaptive benefits of superstition.

It works like this. We human beings are a very bright bunch, and highly adaptable. But we don’t always have all the information we need to make an informed and rational decision. Yet the decision still needs to be made.

And between rational decision making and totally arbitrary, stochastic decisions lies superstition. ^[1]

Superstition, as we all know, is a belief in false patterns. For example, there is no rational way that breaking a mirror can somehow warp the laws of probability against you, and we all know this.

And yet, who among us can truthfully state that even in the second right after the breaking of a mirror, the idea of the resulting bad luck did not cross their mind and give them a tinge of dread.

That’s who superstition works. And we are primed for superstition. We evolved big brains capable of not simply observing our surroundings, but drawing inferences about it. We can spot the patterns of the universe, and that has taken us from the days of noticing the tracks left by animals to today’s most cutting edge science, and will take us well beyond.

But as we all know, this creates many false patterns in our minds. We call these false patterns superstitions when they are something as obvious as thinking black cats are bad luck, but the phenomenon goes far deeper than a bunch of old wives’ tales. Even something as simple and incontrovertible as disliking a particular odor because you associate it with a traumatic event in your life is, when analyzed from the point of pure reason, a superstition.

After all, the odor didn’t do anything to hurt you.

But our minds make these associations anyhow, and there is little we can do about it. Knowing that these patterns of associations are false is of little help. To use a personal example, I know that my claustrophobia is completely irrational and that I am in no more danger in a small space than in a big one.

But close spaces of all sorts (like tunnels… yikes) still make me incredibly anxious. Reason alone cannot conquer such deep seated fears. And yet I am a pretty rational, reasonable fellow who is certainly intelligent enough to know what is rationally supportable and what is not.

Arguably, there is even a chance that my fear of small spaces might endanger my life some day. If I was in a situation where the only way to survive was to force myself into a small, tight space (I am sweating just thinking about it), I might well hesitate at a critical moment and end up dead from claustrophobia.

And yet still, I am saying that superstition is an adaptive trait. Clearly, at some point in the evolution of human consciousness, it was decided that having our pattern-seeking minds generate many false positives was worth it for the benefit derived from the genuine patterns we perceived.

And like I said in the beginning of this text, decisions need to be made. Those of our ancestors who froze in place when called upon to make a decision based on insufficient information did not survive to pass on their genes to us. We are all descended from a long line of people with very active pattern-seeking minds, and where there was no pattern to be gleaned from our existing knowledge, we took our best guess and acted upon that.

And it’s worked out pretty good so far.

Consider the problem of Buridan’s Ass^[2]. The idea behind this thought experiment is that if you place a hungry donkey in the middle of equidistant and equally appealing stacks of hay, the donkey will starve to death because there is no rational basis upon which to decide which stack to eat.

That is precisely the problem superstition solves. And the patterns that form in our minds usually have at least a grain of truth to them. My claustrophobia is not entirely baseless. One can get trapped or stuck in small places, and my claustrophobia certainly makes it a lot less likely that such a situation will ever happen to me.

Similarly, the broken mirror might not be able to change your luck, but if it that is what it takes to remind people do be careful around mirrors (which used to be extremely expensive), what’s the harm?

I am not saying all superstition is harmless or beneficial. Far from it. The world is currently experiencing the effects of a superstition engendered by some very bad science and passed around like it’s the gospel truth in the form of the anti-vaccination movement. Superstition in the form of religion continues to be a source of strife in some parts of the world (but also a source of comfort and strength to the rest of the world). People’s irrational fears cause untold amounts of unnecessary
pain, fear, and confusion every single day, and the world would be, on the whole, better off if it were a little more rational and a little less superstitious.

I just wanted to use today’s column to remind people that everybody is superstitious, even you, and that we could not function as human beings without our ability to create unsupportable beliefs and act upon them.

If you claim to be free of superstition, you are basically claiming to always have enough information to make a fully rational, informed decision in absolutely every circumstance, and how rational is that?

Just admit that you are a superstitious human being like the rest of us, and learn to deal with it.

That’s all for today, folks! Talk to you again tomorrow.

Ref. : The fat man in Casablanca.

It is too dammed hot. Good thing I have been looking into air conditioning some more. Turns out I can get a window unit from Canadian Tire for around $109, which is way less than the $175 that the Ashton Group (no relation) is asking.

But the Ashton Group’s price includes installation, and from what I have read that is no small thing for those of us who are not lucky enough to have a window the exact same shape as an air conditioner. From what I can tell, in order to really make these things work, you need to fill the rest of the window with something in order to make it a tight fit, and that involves getting a big chunk of plastic and cutting it to fit the window and then cutting a hole out to fit the air conditioner into, and all of that makes my head spin and gives me images of myself staring at a pile of scraps of white plastic, with a slightly blood-streaked Exacto knife in my hands.

See, part fo the problem is that we don’t have any horizontal windows in this apartment. All our windows open vertically, that is to say, right to left. And all the window unit air conditioners I have ever seen seem to be designed with horizontal windows in mind. Stick unit in window, lower window till it reaches top of unit, and voila, a seal can be formed.

But I am pretty sure that the only way that would work for us is if we stuck the air conditioner in sideways, and I am pretty sure they are not designed to work like that.

I may be wrong.

Until I sort all this out, though, all I can do is hydrate aggressively and point the fan at my head and try to make it through the afternoon. Right now, I have a heat-stroke headache and a little nausea, and so writing today’s blog entry is not real easy. I would rather be pulling a siesta right now and sleeping through the heat.

But I will be getting together with friends later, so that means I must needs blog now. Oh, how I suffer.

And speaking of heat, Iraq. (Because it’s very hot there. Wow, what a deft segue.)

As far as I can tell, we have to intervene. These ISIS bastards are not just some random faction in the sectarian melting pot. They are evil people who round people up and kill them, and I am pretty sure we are against that kind of thing.

But I can see why Barack Obama doesn’t want to step back into that quagmire. None of us do. We were all very happy to get the hell out of Iraq and leave them to their own devices.

“Well, we’ve done all we can. It’s up to you now. ” we told the Iraqi people, and they seemed pretty happy with that too. And we didn’t just run away, we left them with all the trained local soldiers and modern-ish military hardware they needed in order to competently defend themselves.

But there was no way we could have seen ISIS coming. We might have predicted that something like ISIS might arise, but we had no way of knowing that such a group would have a very brutal “take no prisoners” attitude that strikes fear in the hearts of their enemies and causes them to flee rather than risk being captured by ISIS and, if they are lucky, merely shot in the head.

So these pricks are way beyond the Geneva Convention, let alone any other form of moral restraint. They will continue to slaughter innocent non-combatants until they are stopped.

And we really don’t want them becoming the new government of Iraq and Syria.

Unfortunately, this means that the Republicans are right when they say intervention is necessary. They’re right for a lot of the wrong reasons, but they are right. They are even right when they blame this on the withdrawal of American troops… it is pretty hard to imagine that ISIS would have made much progress against the American military machine.

However, as painful as it is to agree with those morally deranged morons in the GOP, this turmoil might turn out to be a blessing in disguise for Obama, because if he does decide to intervene, he will be able to show the GOP and the rest of the world how you do an invasion of Iraq the right way.

Just imagine the dismay and confusion amongst the Dick Cheney set when not only does Obama do everything they said he should do (making it real hard to disagree with him on it, even for them), but does a way, way, way better job of it than Dick and Bush and Rumsy and Rice and the rest ever did.

That would drive them nuts. And they could totally do it, too, seeing as they are not, in fact, mentally retarded spoiled rich people who have no conception of the value of a dollar and who think of war as a fun game you play with the lives and money of poor people who don’t matter.

Obama has a lot of flaws, but he is very well organized and capable, and that is just the sort of person to lead both a smoothly efficient counter-ISIS operation and any resulting nation-building required afterward.

There certainly wouldn’t have been any of the insanity-producing incompetence that Dubya engendered last time.

It starts with the military advisers already there. Next will come air strikes, which are not a total solution but can at least keep ISIS bottled up in the cities they already hold. You might be able to hide an army in a city, but just try to move your troops against Baghdad when any visible troop movement results in death from above.

I also think special attention needs to be paid to where these motherfuckers are getting their money, and we have to be absolutely ruthless in punishing whoever is holding their cash for them.

Well, that’s all for me today, folks. See you again tomorrow!

Don’t worry, I am not going to subject you all to my endless gushing on about how awesome My Little Pony : Friendship Is Magic is today. This time, I am only using it as a jumping off point.

The episode in question is Feeling Pinkie Keen, the fifteenth episode of the first season. Briefly, in it, a somewhat nutty character named Pinkie Pie demonstrates repeatedly that her random twiches and flutters have amazingly accurate predictive powers. Twilight Sparkle, who despite being super magical does not believe in Pinkie’s powers (because magic makes sense and random twitch prognostication does not) and embarks upon an episode-long quest to prove that Pinkie’s powers are just random chance and not real, becoming quiet obsessive about it in a comedic way.

Of course, by the end of the episode, she finally breaks down and admits that Pinkie’s powers really do work. And I am fine with that. But the moral at the end was sort of vague and didn’t really make it clear what the true lesson from the episode is, so I thought I would clarify.

Furthermore, a little research and a lot of virtual banging my head against the wall and saying ARGH later, I have accidentally learned that the episode is hugely controversial in some quarters, especially the asshole atheist demographic who considered it an attack on logic and rationality, and flipped the fucking out over it, because apparently they get to say whatever they want but if something even looks like an attack on one of their sacred beliefs, it’s a national fucking tragedy.

Because of course they did. My lack of God, I hate those people. Doesn’t it always seem like those who claim to love a virtue most understand it the least? Because these people clearly did not understand the episode and do not understand how science, reason, and logic really work.

So here is the basic lesson for today, kids : science, logic, and reason are based on evidence. The evidence is king, always, forever, in all circumstances, period.

And if your theory does not fit the evidence, it is your theory that must change. Rejecting evidence a priori because it does not fit your existing philosophy is the exact opposite of reason and science. It is rank prejudice, an argument made out of ignorance instead of knowledge, and intellectual hubris of the worst possible sort.

Twilight Sparkle’s mistake was in ignoring the evidence. Sure, one or two accurate predictions might be coincidence, but in the episode Pinkie Pie makes at least a dozen, and a real scientist does not reject the evidence simply because it does not make sense to her. The entirety of science depends on us finding things that do not make sense to us, and figuring out how they work. It always starts with something that does not currently make sense. That is one of the greatest joys of the science and the pursuit of knowledge : explaining the previously inexplicable.

Instead of obsessively rejecting the very clear pattern in the available evidence, Twilight Sparkle should have simply treated Pinkie’s powers as the fascinating new phenomena they were, and studied them with an open mind.

I can see what pissed people off, though. Here is the moral of the episode :

No, no, no. It’s not about choosing to believe things. It’s about being open to the evidence. Reality doesn’t give a crap what we want to believe or choose to believe. Something is either true or it isn’t, period. Twilight Sparkle had no choice but to believe in Pinkie Pie’s powers because that’s the hypothesis supported by the evidence.

The choice lies in choosing to ignore the evidence because you don’t want to have to change your mind about something, not in finally bowing to the evidence. One of the bedrock principles of all forms of the rational pursuit of knowledge is that you are absolutely helpless before the evidence. You are a slave to reality. In order to be a truly rational person, you have to leave your mind open to being completely changed by new evidence.

Otherwise, all you are doing is putting a tinfoil halo on your own ignorance and prejudice.

The pursuit of reason and truth is not easy. The philosopher’s road has never been a smooth one. You have to remain steadfast in your belief in uncertainty, and be absolutely convinced of the need for doubt. Ignorance and prejudice can creep into even the most regimented of minds, and therefore you must be ever-vigilant in policing your own thoughts.

And you can never, ever, ever let yourself fall prey to the delusion that error and prejudice are something that happens to other people. You are as human as the rest of us, and just as fallible. One of the worst and most persistent delusions known to humanity is the delusion that you are logical.

Like hell you are. You’re an irrational, emotional, instinctual animal just like the rest of the grunting, mating, squatting creatures on the Earth. We human beings are lucky in that we are capable of using logic and the scientific method as the powerful tools they are, but they are only that : tools. And we are not our tools.

No amount of enlightenment can change the fundamental nature of human existence. Despite its hubris, reason and the right hand side of the brain can not eliminate the rest of our natures, and when we let arrogant rationality fool us into believing that this has happened, we only leave ourselves at the mercy of forces we refuse to even acknowledge exist.

True rationality comes from understanding and accepting our fundamentally animal natures, and embracing them when we can and working with them in mind when we cannot.

Otherwise, you’re just another smug delusional egotist completely sure they have all the answers, just like any other bigot, religious or otherwise.

Well that’s it from me for today, nice people. Sorry to get all ranty there, but this kind of thing pisses me off.

I get really angry about logic!

See you tomorrow, folks!

I’ve decided that I am going to go through all the videos I have uploaded to YouTube both to remind myself that I am awesome (no really, I am!) and to find the ones I want to repost to Facebook and hence share with new people, like my sisters.

It is somewhat slow going, as my videos are not exactly short (problem) and even when it is me talking, I still can’t sit still and watch them quietly. Turns out I can’t even binge-watch myself.

Speaking of binge-watching, I’m up to the 12th episode of the first season of My Little Pony : Friendship Is Magic. I am watching two episodes per meal, which is as close to binge-watching as I get. It would go a lot faster if I was the kind of person that can just watch a ton of episodes of something in a row, but I know damned well that I can’t.

If I tried, I would just get sick of whatever it was I was watching. Little errors and similarities would build up in my mind and, worst case scenario, I would end up permanently “off” something I once enjoyed.

So no, no rapid brony-izing for me. At this rate, it will take me around a month to complete my journey. Fair enough.

The show is awesome, of course. To me, its beauty is that it does exactly what dozens of other shows like it have done, but it does it so much better.

The characters are genuinely lovable, and have consistent, believable personalities. The animation is colorful, expressive, and smooth. The humour is genuinely funny, with perfectly timed comedy beats that express the comedy (and charm) with grace and density. The editorial voice is light but firm, just the sort of thing to keep a show on an even keel and have all the plot points come off so smoothly that it makes it all seem effortless.

I don’t even mind that the show makes the moral of each episode really clear with the whole “Twilight Sparkle writes a letter to Princess Celestia telling her what she has learned about friendship at the end of each episode” thing. The show is, after all, intended for kids, and kids need that kind of guidance. There is nothing wrong with fables.

And I love how the show strikes just the right balance between realism and fantasy. The world of Equestria is a wonderful, magical place that any kid would want to live in, and definitely a nicer place to be than our own mundane, complicated world. Mission accomplished there. And yet, it’s not a sunwashed saccharine plastic paradise either. It’s not unrealistically perfect. Friends fight, things don’t work out right, the days are not filled with nothing but peace love and harmony.

Because honestly, a too=perfect fantasy world would completely fail to teach kids anything. What kids (and adults) need to learn is how to cope with difficult, stressful situations, and therefore your world has to leave room for difficult, stressful situations. The idea is to take the audience through them in a safe way, and thus give them the kind of ersatz life experience that is the goal of all great art.

But enough pony talk. (Don’t get me started… oh right, you didn’t. )

When I go over my videos, it’s nearly always a very positive experience for me, because guess what? I find them fascinating. Turns out, everything I talk about in them is exactly the sort of thing I find really interesting.

I mean, what are the odds?

Seriously though, other than occasionally wishing I was wearing a shirt in some of them, I enjoy them, and they are good for the ego. And my ego needs all the shoring up it can get given its rapid decay rare due to depression. The talky ones are very interesting, and the funny ones are funny, and it really reminds me that I am a talented dude and that I should not feel bad about my abilities just because depression gets in the way of their use sometimes.

Things will happen when they happen, and beating myself up over everything I am not doing and all the tools I have around me that I never use only further guarantees that I won’t use them because the guilt makes me avoid them.

It’s amazing how nimbly depression can find ways of fueling itself. Well, the thing about being psychologically unstable is that it’s remarkably stable.

You can defeat yourself every single time.

In a couple of hours, I will be leaving to go to Ray’s birthday party, and to be quite honest, I really don’t feel like it, I am having a sleepy day, and all I want to do is go back to sleep and catch up on my Z’s.

The problem is that the part is at 6 pm, which is way earlier than we usually get going around here. Usually we are not even at the restaurant until 8. On a normal Sunday, I would have four hours or more in which to take a nap and then take a shower and get ready to go out.

But no, I will have, at best, an hour and a half for naptime and then half an hour for a shower and such. My naps are usually longer than an hour and a half, so I would have to set an alarm if I wanted to be awake on time.

And that sucks. I have spent so much time with a loose, lazy schedule that any little change seems like a massive imposition. All I really wanna do is go to sleep for three hours and then wake up and do my thang.

But that is just plain not in the cards today, so when I am done here, I will attempt one of my power naps where I don’t exactly sleep like normal but it performs the important, immediate functions of sleep.

Wish me luck on that, it’s just as likely to fail as to succeed.

Talk to you again tomorrow, folks!

Time to kiss another demon goodbye.

I watched a lot of cartoons as a kid. And I was a kid in the Eighties (mostly), and so nearly every one of them was a product of the pro-social movement that was the Eighties response to the criticisms of the Seventies. Social conservatives on both the left and the right attacked cartoons for promoting what seemed to be anti-social, even anarchic attitudes, and that was an easy sell to the harried parents of the Seventies dealing with their young rambunctious kids.

Remember, just like effortless weight loss and less taxes, more services, you can always sell people on the idea that their kids’ rotten behaviour is NOT THEIR FAULT.

So all the Eighties cartoons I watched went out of their way to promote pro-social values. Primary among these values (as they were mostly defined by liberals) were cooperation, tolerance… and friendship.

Ah, friendship. You can’t go wrong talking about how awesome it is to have friends. Friendship isn’t even a virtue, exactly. It’s something that just happens naturally to most people. You can teach people to be better friends by being more considerate and less selfish, but for the most part, friendship just happens.

Except, of course, if you’re a very lonely little boy like I was. Then all this talk about how awesome friendship is just makes you feel worse about being alone. For all of my childhood, I got the message beaten into me via repetition that friendship was this wonderful, magical thing that made everything better. Friends helped each other out. Friends cared about each other. Friends protected each other.

Friends were everything I didn’t have in my life and didn’t think I would ever get. So what was life-affirming and pro-social for other kids was very depressing for sad little me, and I was too young to be able to articulate it but I am pretty sure it made me a sadder little boy.

When I look back at my childhood, the oddest thing to me is how I just absorbed whatever happened to me. I didn’t really react to it, or form an opinion on it. I didn’t even get mad at most of them. When you are a kid, you don’t really have a sense of what is normal and acceptable, and what is not. That is especially true if you are am isolated and therefore under-socialized kid like I was. I didn’t have my friends’ households to compare mine to. I just had my own sad little world of books and television and video games, and it never occurred to me that there was something wrong with that.

We are born adaptable and are able to become whatever sort of person our society and our circumstances dictate. Therefore, no matter what kind of household you grow up in, it’s normal, at least until you enter the wider world of school.

And by then, most of the really important variables have become constants in your mind.

And things grow strange in the dark. Starting with having a family that never really had time for me with siblings who were too much older than me for me to relate to them or feel like part of their group, then adding the tragedy of my missing out on kindergarten because I was too bright for it (first time my intelligence fucked me over, yay), then falling to the the bottom of the pecking order in elementary school, there is only one word to describe what I became : socially retarded.

And there were all those cartoons pushing friendship. As if kids wouldn’t make friends unless you told them to do it. Praising friendship is like praising family. It’s (almost) always an easy sell because you are just telling people how awesome it is to do what their instincts tell them to do anyhow.

And yeah, I’m bitter. It’s hard not to be. I really got screwed in life in so many ways. I was just an innocent kid and did not deserve all the crap life put me through. And I was too passive and timid to fight it.

I was a delicate little flower, and I was treated like crabgrass.

All my guardian angels were asleep on the watch. All the adults who were supposed to look out for me failed to do so. I know I was not the easiest kid to handle, but there should have been someone in my life who could do it. Someone who stood up to the plate and took on the job, instead of just relying on how easy it was to ignore me to help pretend I wasn’t around.

I wasn’t the easiest kid to handle. But I was still a kid. Someone should have been there for me.

Obviously, it is watching My Little Pony : Friendship Is Magic that has brought all this stuff up for me. Part of me wishes I could go to the happy accepted innocent fun world where all this stuff makes sense. Even when I was little, I would look into the windows of seemingly happy homes and wish they would let me into their warm and accepting world. But I never truly believed it could happen because I knew, deep down, that I didn’t belong in that world, and that I would spoil it far before it could ever fix me.

I guess that is what happens when you are sexually abused as a child. Your innocence is forever lost, and you feel broken and dirty and poisonous for the rest of your life. And the feeling is not entirely unjustified, at least if you are as sensitive a soul as I am. I can feel when my strangeness is hurting people. I can tell when contact with the negatives of my nature is draining the happiness and life force out of others.

And I am too kind a soul not to care about it.

Where is the love for the gentle men of the world?

Talk to you tomorrow, folks.

Or, as I am beginning to think of it, my entourage.

As you all remember from Wednesday’s blog, I have been delving into this concept of my having this psychological crowd inside me that can get agitated and end up taking up so much of my consciousness that I end up feeling stupid and scared and confused.

This is the root of my social anxiety. When I am safe in my tiny little world, the crowd stays quiet. But when I get nervous, they overwhelm me and I end up all freaked out… and if that happens in a social situation, I end up lost in a situation I just can’t handle because the noises in my head are just SO FUCKING LOUD.

Ahem. When I brought all this up with my therapist this morning, he suggested that what I do with this information is to make a list of the various elements in my mental crowd and see just what is going on out there.

A classic cognitive therapy exercise… I approve.

At first, though, I didn’t think I could do it, because for me, this crowd of mine is a new concept and I hadn’t gotten to where I felt I could differentiate it yet. It’s just a big amorphous blob that expands and contracts and makes me feel like I could lose touch with reality at any second as it blot out my inner sun.

But after thinking about it for a little while, I decided that I could at least point out some of the major elements that I know must be in there. There’s no need for it to be an exhaustive list. Any amount of focus will help in the process of thinning out that crowd and bringing me closer to the inner peace that I seek and the real connection to others and to the world that will let me finally stop treading water and come ashore for good.

In general, what is in there is unresolved emotions of all shapes and kinds. Turns out that when I push something out of my mind because I don’t want to deal with it, it just joins the crowd, and I get a little further away from others and from reality, and as a consequence, I end up feeling less real.

More specifically, however, let’s go around the party and see who all have showed up.

Well, there’s Anger. Wow, is there Anger. A lot of bad things have happened to me in my life, and I have spent a lot of time isolated and alone. But I never got angry about that at the time. It never even occurred to me that I might be able to change the way things were. I was too busy just making it through every day. Funny how depression makes survival a full time job.

But as it turns out, things that should have made you angry at the time do not disappear just because they didn’t. You can’t just dodge your anger and the pain that caused it and never have to deal with it. It just joins the crowd of other unresolved feelings that you have been putting off, and provides that crowd with its energy and agitation.

Fear is there too, of course. A lot of anxiety that I couldn’t handle at the time, and so it just ended up becoming this corona of crap that I have been imprisoned by, and protected by, for over twenty years. There is so much of life that I just cannot handle with all this crap taking up space in my capacious cranium weighing me down, and so the world can be a pretty scary place for me. And so Fear goes into the mix.

There’s a lot of Sex in there too. I have more or less ignored my sexuality for my entire life. Occasionally I masturbate, mostly just to keep the pressure down, and that is as far as I ever take it. The vast majority of all the wants and desires and lusts and passions that make up a fully expressed human sexuality lie, like an iceberg, out of sight. All that energy and drive sidelined and ignored, never pursued. That has to add a lot of raw heat energy and steam pressure to the crowd.

There’s some people there too, of course. It’s not all amorphous forces. My sister Catherine is there, criticizing me when I was far too young to handle it and telling me I was useless. The other siblings are there too, shouting conflicting instructions at me and making me freeze in place in total confusion. My parents are in there, but that is probably true of everyone. Percy McGougan, despised middle school teacher, is in there too, that petty little tyrant. Lenny McAusland, primary bully of my childhood, is in there, taking great delight in stomping on my head as I lay on the ground.

In fact, let’s move into places. There are places in that outer realm of mine too, including nearly all of Parkside Elementary School, but especially the southmost boys’ bathrooms where I got trapped in a stall, the entire playground, the fields and the gym where I utterly failed at gym, and of course, the decorative planter I hid in.

And oh look, there’s the Chinese restaurant where my parents told me they were withdrawing funding from my university education and brought my entire world to a screeching halt.

And finally, there’s the spa creatively called The Spa where my father molested me and taught me to take my mind away when things got bad (which is a really great way to deal with reality), and ripped the hole in my soul through which all the other miseries and pains of my life got in.

So yeah. I have some idea what makes up this field of frozen debris that surrounds me. It’s the usual stuff. I have just stopped pretending it’s invisible and finally realized just what it is all doing to me.

And for me.

And some day, I will make it all…. stop.

See you tomorrow, folks!