The people that saw the plastic cake topping as a dildo should ask themselves why they see the world that perverted way. There are many objects around us that may be treated as phallic symbols, down to even every bottle standing upright. That’s not a good reason to actually cry bloody murder about them. Treat bottles as bottles and cake toppings as cake toppings, and everything will be fine. If you see phallic symbols in innocuous things – go see a doctor.

Is this our new hero? A drug addict, with the motto “you can do whatever you want if you have enough money”? Spare me the story of the movie, I know. Movies serve to educate and lead us to the higher ideals. What are the ideals here? That bankers and brokers are really cool? That raking in money for doing a disservice to people is the new kind of Robin Hood chivalry? The movie is not just useless, it is poisonous to the society. This is the kind of movie that makes one wish for censorship.

I think “a glass of warm spit with a hair floating” is the best fitting description for this film. I am sorry I even watched the half I did.

Nearly at the end, there is a court of sorts that judges whether Earth would present a danger to the survival and well-being of the existing system in the future. It is a “Security Council” of sorts, for the three participating galaxies.

“The facts have been integrated. By their own testimony, these are a savage and brutal people, given to all manner of atrocities. They eat each other, they starve each other, they kill each other. They have no art and only the most primitive of science, yet such is their violent nature that even with so little knowledge they are now energetically using it to exterminate each other, tribe against tribe. Their driving will is such that they may succeed. But if by some unlucky chance they fail, they will inevitably, in time, reach other stars. It is this possibility which must be calculated: how soon they will reach us, if they live, and what their potentialities will be then.”

The book is written in 1958 and the United Nations Security Council had its first meeting in 1946. Apparently, Heinlein saw quite clearly the danger of the organization: such an overarching organization of powerful nations is charged with keeping the world “stable” and may destroy other nations that threaten the status quo. Both organizations are charged with keeping the peace but the one in the book easily destroys whole planets and civilizations for the sake of safety. What does the one we know in our world do? What will it do in the future?

Anyway, even besides this obvious political twist to the story, the book is quite amazing. It has a very romantic story, in fact, without ever mentioning anything about love. It is rather about romantic friendship and I nearly forgot that the friendship can be romantic. It is so good that there are authors like Robert Heinlein to remind me.

“The best things in history are accomplished by people who get ‘tired of being shoved around.’ ”
— Robert A. Heinlein, “Have Space Suit – Will Travel”

An absolutely hilarious piece of news from the movie:

… the game theory/free market model is now undergoing interrogation by economists who suspect a more irrational model of behaviour is appropriate and useful. In fact, in formal experiments the only people who behaved exactly according to the mathematical models created by game theory are economists themselves, and psychopaths.

And so it is a very interesting series. Highly recommended.

Being different means some people don’t know what to talk to me about, because the normal topics don’t apply to me. It’s harder for them to relate.

Yes, I can certainly see how that may happen. We were talking with a friend the other day and he mentioned that other people find it difficult when he does not talk to them of sports and politics. They seem not to know what else they could converse about. And we, me and him, can roam the city together for the length of a whole day and never run out of subjects to discuss. And we never talk about football.

I do not like myself to talk trivial subjects like sports. I think sport is there to do it, not to talk about. So it is great if you play football and can tell me about your game, but if you only see it on television, why talk about it? I often have this difficulty with business people of all sorts. They would invite me to a dinner and then fall into an awkward silence when they find out I do not plan to have a meaningless conversation about baseball. And then it is like if they have nothing else to talk about! People feel themselves on unfamiliar ground, they are lost, they struggle to find a subject of conversation…

But behold – just ask a few questions to find out what really interests them, and the same people will liven your whole evening with tales of fishing in Thailand or going around the world in a kayak. Is it not far more interesting and enjoyable than a place-filling and time-wasting standard sports conversation? And if they do not have any interests beyond eating, drinking and watching sports on television, I do appreciate that they never call on me again.

Sometimes I just don’t feel like hanging out with people who are being unhealthy or going through life not caring about what they do or who just want to get drunk or stoned. I don’t think they’re bad people, but it’s not that fun for me.

Precisely. We do not want those people to waste the time of our lives. Let us have conversations that matter.

The Cable reports in their exclusive about the battle being fought by America against on-line privacy in an obscure U.N. General Assembly committee that is looking to constraint the widespread surveillance of the Internet. The proposal by Germany and Brazil spearheads the mounting movement inside U.N. that seeks to uphold the Internet privacy as a basic human right. The Cable notes that “American representatives have made it clear that they won’t tolerate such checks on their global surveillance network.”

I was actually looking for Twitter Widower Support Group, I heard they give out t-shirts. That turns out to be just a rumour. Or do they exist and I simply could not find them?..

Speaking publicly about her experience for the first time, one girl adopted from China and later sent to a second home said she was made to dig her own grave. Another re-homed child, a Russian girl, recounted how a boy in one house urinated on her after the two had sex; she was 13 at the time and was re-homed three times in six months.

I am happy to know that Russia forbid adoption to U.S. since last year.

More: Russia launches criminal inquiry into U.S. child exchanges

Leda Monster Bunny – Better Than Text

You get the best impression with Google simply by being Leda Monster Bunny. Otherwise, it’s hopeless. No, really, she is getting millions of hits on YouTube and all for just, what, being cute? And we are struggling to get our websites well organized and respectful to all those guidelines for webmasters and all, sweating day and night through the little details of our code. I think I cannot help but feel just a little bit envious that someone gets to be in the top for just a bit of good looks and cosmetics.

Now I understand why people turn to those fairly complicated techniques of SEO – they desperately hope that this cosmetics will do wonders for their sites and the sites will sky-rocket like Leda Monster Bunny videos. But, you know what? She works hard too, it takes her time, dedication and effort to look like that. So, that is what it really takes – effort, time, dedication. We will get there.

At its very basic, we are told that the social contract is an implied contract that one enters into by being a member of society. The contract offers the citizen certain protections while requiring that the citizen will be justly punished for breaking the laws of that society. The concept was first fleshed out by Socrates although he himself refuted the concept as the source of justice later arguing that the justice is inherent to men and cannot originate externally.

This contradiction and inconsistency is carried through the later works of Thomas Hobbes that form the ground for nearly all social contract theorists. The inconsistency, presented by Hobbes, could only be resolved again by admitting that the relationship between the society and the individual does not form the ground for morality. On the contrary, the natural morality of men makes the ground for the forming of the society and its rules.

People do not have an inherent desire to kill, rob and rape. Quite the contrary, if the society norms and laws were lifted today, we would likely go ahead just as we did before, cheerfully helping each other and being nice to strangers. People do not steal, rape and murder not because of some ephemeral social contract but because they are not inclined to. However, we do notice that some people have a tendency for misbehaving, right?

On the one hand, we have to admit that people who have the tendency to steal, murder and rape do so whether the society has mechanisms for punishing the said behaviours or not. On the other hand, we notice that these behaviours are tightly coupled to the possession of property. Unsurprisingly, Locke based his concept of social contract on the idea that men only have disputes when property is involved. The relationships within families are pre-social, they are moral agreements entered to and carried out willingly. As soon as people start having property, claims to property and property disputes, the relationships deteriorate and the necessity to protect oneself and one’s property arises.

Recognizing the problem, there were many attempts to remove the property concerns from the lives of men. Ideals of communism, for example, would be well aligned with removing concerns about property. Unfortunately, the execution of the plans to remove the property concerns was always undermined by the property concerns of the executioners themselves.

What does the “social contract” change in this picture? Exactly nothing. The concerns of men not related to property are governed by the inherent morality of men irrespective of not only social contracts but even the law. The concerns of property cannot be removed without changing the nature of thought in the society at large, so no ephemeral social contract is going to change that.

I come to the conclusion that “social contract” is a meaningless concept that has no relevance to my thought. It is a clever exercise used by philosophers later adopted by the politicians to join the arsenal of other confusing tricks.

Additionally, the “social contract”, while being useless, probably has a detrimental effect on the society and the independence of thought and action. If I believed in the “social contract”, I would be less likely to exhibit “fend off for myself” behaviour and more likely to behave like cattle, wouldn’t I?

I have this strange habit of reading news in the morning. Not that I have a newspaper and a cup of coffee, no. But I have a cup of tea and read the news online. Today is one of those silly days when my news feed is jammed with one single news item. Today it is Twitter – security of Twitter was improved in some way and every single newspaper and online publication in the world seems to make it their duty to make a big splash about it. Okay, maybe, just maybe, I want to get a notice of that, somewhere in a corner, three words. I definitely not interested so much as to read the whole morning news about it.

In a word, the morning news reading is spoiled. This happens from time to time. The news in this “networked world” are weird. Either there is a lot of “buzz” – irrelevant small items or everyone is copying each other on the same item all over the place. It does seem like reading the consolidated blog feed of sites you care about is, after all, the best way to get news in today’s world. We have to get used to the fact that most relevant news are not delivered anymore by general news outlets but by very specific people with a passion to write about events that matter to them personally.

• How to change education – from the ground up

• Changing education paradigms

Absolutely worth your time.

• The Real Privacy Problem
• Three Paradoxes of Big Data

The Internet and the related technologies erode the very fabric of society. They do so quietly, surreptitiously, in little steps. As usual, do not blame the tool, blame those that use it for evil. Although some tools better not have existed in the first place, I feel.

From my own experience I found there are two things that work (and a hundred others that do not). Those are substitution and delay. These are two tactics I want to share in the hope they will help someone some day.

Why does it not work to “simply stop” doing something? Our mind does not make a difference between our body and our psychological state, the mind itself. So all our behaviors, all habits, they are a part of the larger “body” that includes both physical and psychological world. If we ask ourselves to stop doing something, for our subconscious it is the same as chopping off a part of the body, i.e. impossible. You cannot willingly give up a part of your body, why would you give up a part of your psychological “body”?

Enter substitution. We will not ask the subconscious to stop anything knowing well that it is impossible. What we will do is to propose something else instead. I do not know how and why it works but it does. Whenever you have a craving for a cigarette, make love or go for a run instead. Every single time, no exceptions. In a couple of days your habit will get substituted and you will not crave cigarettes anymore, you will crave sex or running. This is truly amazing but that is how it works. Just make sure you substitute something that you are willing to live with for the rest of your life. Hint: craving for food is really a bad habit to create, do not substitute anything with food, okay?

Another possibility is to tell yourself that you will do whatever it is you want but you will do it a little later. Tomorrow, for example. The subconscious does not really have a proper concept of time, it lives in the present, so it really does not matter when you say it will happen. I usually say to myself “tomorrow morning”. It helps enormously. You can move any craving to a slightly later period in life, like tomorrow or five minutes later. You will have to do it, but now you have a choice to smoke only one cigarette a day or have only a single meal a day. This works too. Try not to link “later” with other events in your life, like “when I am home” – subconscious can trace and remember those and coming home will trigger whatever it was you were postponing, so do it a few times and you will have a set habit.

Having habits is not wrong. The only problem is that they tend to take over the control of the life after a while and I do not like that. I want to control my life myself, consciously. So the fewer “automatic” habits I have – the better.

I agree. It would be great to work at a place without a trace of stress. It would be great if my home felt like that too. This place feels more home-like than my home. It is very, very comforting. I feel simply like staying.

How do they do that?