american taliban

so now it’s illegal to get drunk at a bar in texas. this is yet another example of the american taliban, the religious right, trying to legislate morality, and micromanage the private lives of citizens who should be free. we need to stand up for the rights of the 2,200 people who have been arrested in bars in texas, simply for the crime of being drunk. they are political prisoners. the state of texas needs to overturn the law that allows police to arrest people in bars for being drunk, because it is simply unconscionable. and we need to stand with the man in afghanistan who faces execution for being an apostate from islam. all of these people deserve monetary compensation from the government for having their civil liberties taken away and being unduly deprived of their freedom, and the pain and suffering of being arrested for a victimless crime. and as for the teacher in florida who had sex with her 14-year-old student and got off without any time in jail, just 3 years house arrest, i agree with the punishment. 14-year-old boys are very sexually curious and attracted towards women who are pretty and have large breasts, such as this teacher, so i don’t see how he could be considered a victim. when i was 14, if a lady like her had sex with me, i would certainly not think there was anything wrong with it. i think what is wrong is how society condemns people like her. you know, the prophet mohammad had sex with young girls, but he was married to them, which means it was perfectly fine (at least that is what a muslim would say about it). but why do we have to be so judgemental of people who have momentary lapses in judgement and impulsively do things we consider wrong? why don’t we consider people’s true character, their heart? now one thing i do know is that this lady was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which her lawyer claims is an excuse for her behavior, and she pleaded insanity. i was in a mental institution with a lot of bipolar people, and they are not insane or delusional at all, they just have emotional problems. they can still tell right from wrong, which means they are legally sane. now a lot of times they might be a danger to themselves or others, if their emotions get out of control, but this does not make them crazy. so i don’t think insanity is a valid defense for someone who is bipolar. insanity is only a valid defense for people who have some form of psychosis, such as schizophrenia. if you are bipolar you just have really big emotional highs and lows and lowered impulse control, but those things can also be said about people who are drunk. so why isn’t it a legal defense to say “i was drunk”? because people choose to drink, but they don’t choose to be bipolar. anyway, all the people i talked about are innocent, and should be set free and apologized to. for crying out loud, suppose i went to visit my sister in texas, and went out to a bar and got drunk? does that mean i deserve to go to jail? what is this, soviet russia?!? in soviet russia, you don’t get drunk. drunk gets you. john walker lindh must have a big smile on his face about all this. the bastard.

ok here is a link to the story about abdul rahman, the guy in afghanistan. top muslim clerics: convert must die. well guess what, top muslim clerics? YOU must die! you sick fucks. is NOTHING sacred to you, except your stupid religion? you don’t care about human rights, or women’s rights, or people’s right to decide for themselves what to believe in, or the right of people to simply exist and not be killed? and even the “moderate” clerics want abdul rahman killed? i’ll tell you what: these muslim clerics are the scum of the earth, and the enemy of all humanity, including over a billion people who have been forced against their will into the cult of death called “islam”. we see now islam’s true face: they have no decency, no respect for human rights, human dignity, or any sort of freedom whatsoever. they believe that people must “assimilate or die”. these clerics are murderous madmen, and most of their followers are innocent victims of an oppressive system of brainwashing and intimidation. i think the majority of muslims in the world are simply muslim because they would fear for their lives if they converted to another religion, even though deep down, every muslim knows their religion is utterly false and without merit. the war on terrorism IS a war on islam, and we MUST prevail. let us hope that the majority of muslims are peaceful people who will be happy to be liberated from their oppressive religion. we need to start assassinating all of those radical muslim clerics around the world who have murderous rhetoric, and we should be burning korans in the streets, and burning flags with the star and crescent. there is no way to peacefully coexist with these murderous madmen. the religion of islam is the enemy of all who live, ESPECIALLY its own followers. if we allow the less radical islamic clerics who do not preach murder and violence to survive (such as iraq’s ayatollah sistani), while only assassinating those who call for wanton butchery (such as everyone who called for abdul rahman to be executed), we may arrive at a reasonable solution, where islam can still exist, but the only clerics left will be the moderate ones who do not call for violence. and the majority of muslims are just people who were unlucky enough to be born in countries where everyone is required to be muslim, and they are just trying to live their lives peacefully like anyone else. i hope we can find a way to liberate them with a minimal amount of violence, so that they truly can live their lives peacefully and freely without oppression. and if they choose to stick with islam, then fine, but it will have to be a new islam, a 21st century islam, a religion of peace, not the fundamentalist murderous faith found in afghanistan. because, we did not liberate afghanistan from the taliban only to see it fall back into the hands of the same sort of people. they deserve better. and we should see to it that they get something better than the same old taliban. because otherwise, we really didn’t accomplish anything by invading afghanistan, if osama bin laden is still free, al qaeda is still training its operatives, and people in afghanistan are still oppressed under sharia law. and in that case, we might as well pack up and go, and let the terrorists control the entire middle east, since there is no point even trying to liberate people who don’t want to be free. if the people of afghanistan really believe in sharia, and really want taliban-style oppression of everyone, then maybe we should just let them oppress themselves. but, for some strange reason, i still have an odd faith that people everywhere just want to be free. some polling organization should find out whether that is really the case or not, and actually poll the peoople in muslim countries to find out whether they really want to be free or would prefer to be brutally oppressed. then we will know what to do, and we can follow the will of the people.

the real problem

first a little politics, before i get to the main post. there is a bout of verbal diarrhea going around washington, d.c. first president bush says that our troops are going to stay in iraq until after he leaves office and complete withdrawal will be up to future presidents. this would mean the earliest troops can withdraw from iraq is january 2009! what a stupid thing to say! but he isn’t the only one saying stupid things. hillary clinton, of all people, said something quite stupid, regarding a bill that would make illegal immigration a felony:

"it is certainly not in keeping with my understanding of the scriptures," clinton said, "because this bill would literally criminalize the good samaritan and probably even jesus himself."

what the fuck was she talking about?!? jesus was an illegal immigrant? look, we all know jesus was a member of the popular front for the liberation of judea, not the judean people's liberation front! but he was a native of that land! born in bethlehem, in the occupied west bank. it was illegally occupied by the roman empire, imperialist crusader army. we all know that the roman empire was in violation of several u.n. security council resolutions but did not care. emperor caesar augustus ordered an illegal invasion of germany, the worst strategic blunder in military history, with the exception of bush’s current war in iraq. the roman empire refused to acknowledge that the league of nations gave the united kingdom a mandate to rule over palestine and transjordan! arrogant fools! but jesus was an israeli citizen; he carried his israeli passport for years when he was in exile in egypt from israeli king herod’s murderous goons at the mossad, who killed all the firstborn sons in bethlehem as collective punishment for the terrorist activities of the popular front for the liberation of judea. he was lucky menachem begin and anwar sadat opened up diplomatic relations between israel and egypt, because otherwise his israeli passport would have been invalid in egypt and he would have been an illegal immigrant. but what hillary clinton just doesn’t get is, joseph and the virgin mary had filled out all the requisite paperwork for travel visas for themselves and jesus to go to egypt, and had it notorized in triplicate by a roman proconsul and faxed to the head office in rome. and since jesus was just a baby at that time and had not yet joined the popular front for the liberation of judea, he didn’t show up on caesar augustus’s state-of-the-art new terrorist watch list, which had originally been proposed as a security measure by julius caesar but not enacted for years because a brilliant orator of a senator named cicero filibustered the bill, claiming it infringed upon the civil liberties of law-abiding roman citizens and that it would change it from a republic into an empire. anyway, when joseph, mary, and jesus were in egypt, it was lawful because the pharaoh (acting with the advice and consent of queen nefertiti) had enacted a temporary guest worker program for jews, which some outspoken critics such as moses derided as “slavery”. moses actually led a delegation of jews from egypt on a 40-year fact-finding mission in the desert, funded by taxpayer dollars, the result of which moses died before he could reach israel. anyway, joseph, mary, and jesus were all beneficiaries of this plan, and all got excellent unpaid work experience while in egypt helping to build pyramids, to pad their résumés. their presense in egypt was lawful as long as they did not neglect their pyramid-building duties and showed up for work on time every day and didn’t take unnecessarily long breaks. they were fortunate not to be severely injured or killed, because at the time egypt had no worker safety or child labor laws, ever since the last pharaoh broke up the pyramid builders labor unions. anyway, my point is, the stuff hillary clinton said is just as ridiculous as everything in this paragraph.

and there is a christian man in afghanistan facing the death penalty for his religious beliefs! i thought we defeated the taliban! if we can’t defeat the islamofascists by conventional means, we will be forced to use unconventional means instead. if they don’t free that man and repeal sharia law, i say we ought to invade afghanistan and overthrow its government, a second time, just to show those bastards whose side god is really on. hamid karzai had better shape up and reform his damn country, and stop letting activist judges legislate the death penalty for apostasy. the real problem is the educational system in the madrassas over there. they need “no child left behind”. they need to become a pluralistic open society with freedom of religion and a secret police that “disappears” people with no accountability. the real problem is all the lobbyists in kabul using money to buy the politicians. the only reason they have sharia law in the afghan constitution is osama bin laden arranged for some taliban lobbyists working for him to pay off general rashid dostum to use his influence to have it put in there. ok, so maybe i made some of that up. but we shouldn’t let them execute a man just for being christian! that’s almost as bad as the spanish inquisition! and nobody expects the spanish inquisition!

so anyway, i figured out the real problem i have, the reason i have panic attacks. i met with my psychologist today and got some real insight into this, along with thinking about it on my own a lot. my panic attacks are caused because my personality it split into two distinct, equally important halves. one half of my personality is logical and wants success and wants positive change and for things to improve, and it is very methodical in its thinking but it never accomplishes much because the other half constantly undermines it. the other half of my personality is emotional, very anti-change and pro-status quo, and very oppositional towards other people, and it always seeks short-term pleasure and avoids short-term pain, in very habitual and repetitive ways, and when things don’t go its way, its way of throwing tantrums is to actually make me have panic attacks. it is not very logical in deciding when to throw these panic attacks to undermine my logical side; it just does it whenever it feels threatened. and whenever i am making positive progress, another way the irrational anti-change side undermines me is by tempting me with habitual things i like to do for fun, to distract me from my progress, and ultimately to get me re-addicted to just doing things for short-term fun that i have done in the past. i am constantly having a great internal battle between these 2 sides of my personality, which have a lot of disagreement. this is basically the way the mind of everyone with asperger’s works. we all have a part of us that is constantly seeking to undermine any attempts at change, out of sheer emotional discomfort with the idea of the consequences. in the past, i have recognized this split personality of mine but not properly understood how to solve the problem, thinking that one side is clearly right and the other side is wrong, and that i could somehow destroy that part of me that irrationally opposes all change. but i have had a sort of epiphany about this. the real problem is not the existence of my emotional, pleasure-seeking, irrational, anti-change, habitual side. that is half of my personality, and it is the more interesting half! it has many good aspects to it besides the obvious bad ones. what i really need to do is find a way to reach some accomodation for both sides of my personality, so they can both get what they want and feel satisfied. i think i can strive for success in a way that does not cause undue change to occur without warning, and if i always keep in mind the concerns of my irrational side, and treat them seriously in my conscious mind rather than dismissing them with contempt, i ought to be able to find a way to function as a cohesive whole. what i really need is a common understanding between the 2 sides of my personality, and a unification of thought, purpose, and action, behind one shared vision for how i ought to live my life, rather than 2 competing opposite visions. my 2 sides have been at war for too long and i need to find a way to reach peace. i need to understand that the constant efforts to undermine positive change stem from a genuine concern i have about how change is unpredictable and dangerous and outside my comfort zone. there must be ways to undertake change thoughtfully and carefully, to make it very clear to myself that if i change my mind, i can perfectly well go back to the old way of doing things, no harm done. i need to take the risk out of the equation, and make it a win-win for both sides rather than a zero-sum game where panic attacks and temptation are used to prevent any progress. i can see the good in both sides of me, and i can see how they can work together on common objectives. and hopefully this will take me out of the infinite loop of being a night owl who plays video games all the time and never gets anything done and eats junk food and is unemployed. i must focus on reversible positive change rather than irreversible positive change, because anything irreversible would cause far too much anxiety for that part of me that hates change. i still remember how much i hated graduating high school and college, because those were both irreversible changes i had no control over. and there was no way i could stay young forever and stay in high school forever and never graduate, not that i would want that, just that i like keeping my options open. just being told that i have graduated and have my degree and shouldn’t come to class anymore, that is highly traumatic for a habitual person like me who hates change. that is probably why i hate death so much and have such a strong fear of it, because it is the biggest irreversible change of all, and i hate even the tiniest irreversible changes. i am a perfectionist and if something is done wrong i always want to go back and fix it until it is perfect, and what frustrates me more than anything are the things in life where that does not work because time is 1-way. that is why i hate time, too. i hate everything about time. the way it keeps going by, without consulting anyone. the way it never turns around or questions what it has done, and keeps going, without apologizing to anyone for all the problems it causes. i love games because in games you can start over and play again, as many times as you want, and time is totally reversible. that is how time should be in real life, but it is not, and somebody ought to fix it, but that would violate all the laws of physics. and that is what i hate. i hate that the universe does not bow to my will and change the laws of physics to accomodate my personal wishes. when you write a document with words in it, you can go back and change it, and edit it, to your heart’s content, until it is as flawless as a gem. that is how everything should be, according to my view. and my real frustration with life is, it just doesn’t obey the rules i would prefer for it to obey. i feel like an animal trapped in a zoo, with no freedom. the laws of physics and the fundamental nature of reality are so constricting, people naturally want to just escape. my favorite version of reality is the one hindus believe in, with an eternal cycle of reincarnation. i would love for that to be true! it would be ultimate perfection! far better than the depressing vision the monotheistic religions have, of just living one life full of irreversible change, and having an ultimate outcome that can never be corrected. imagine spending all eternity obsessing over everything you did wrong in the finite amount of time you were alive. that would be torture! but that is what someone like me would do, even if i ended up in heaven. that is why i cheat in almost every game i play. it is the only path to perfection, because i am too fallible to have the skill to easily win every time, and cheating in a video game makes you like a god, in total control of the virtual realm of the video game. if i give my soldiers stupid orders, it does not matter, because they are invincible. that is ultimate victory! when you do not even have to try, and you can just, on a whim, have a single soldier destroy an entire enemy base and not take any damage at all. or your character can know every spell that exists and have the best equipment that exists and be level 99. there are many games and in each one ultimate perfection is different, but i play every game the same way: maximize the chance of success so it is as close to 100% as possible, using any means at my disposal. that is how i wish i could live my life. but the real world does not have any cheat codes, or god mode. i am stuck in this frail organic husk, this human body, which is guaranteed to die no matter what, with a maximal lifespan of perhaps 120 years, but more realistically i could expect to live to maybe 80, if i am even lucky and healthy enough for that, which is doubtful. i feel like a passenger trapped onboard the titanic after all the lifeboats are gone. reality simply is not good enough for my ridiculously high demands. so, i must find a way to compromise, deal with things as they are, take chances, and end up losing in the end no matter how well i do in between now and then. i must find a way to be more realistic in my expectations, and unify my personality peacefully, so that i can become a success, in the short time i am granted the high privilege of existence in this fair and noble universe. the neurons in my brain are wired with a faulty circuit layout, and there is a critical system malfunction that i must fix.

news story about asperger’s

check it out here. apparently bill gates has asperger’s, and so did lots of historical geniuses. this puts me in good company. so, oppose prenatal testing for asperger’s! and let’s not call it a syndrome or a disorder. let’s just call it “the glorious path toward infinite wisdom” or something else catchy like that. now of course, not everyone with asperger’s is a genius. but, at least they are capable of rational thought and have excellent memory! some of them are a little more like “rain man” than others. i think my case is not very severe, which is good, because my other mental health issues, such as panic attacks, are enough of a problem for me. and here is a thread on some sort of site where a lot of people have posted their opinions about religion, and gotten into a big argument. very interesting.

who is responsible?

when you look at all the fighting in iraq, at everyone killed by the u.s. forces and the insurgents and the jihadists and the shiite militias and the sunni militias and the kurdish militias, and all the vast numbers of people permanently wounded or disabled, or who will get cancer or birth defects from depleted uranium, and ask who is responsible, the answer is clear. george w. bush. he is completely responsible for all of the bloodshed. not just those people killed or injured by the american troops, or given cancer and birth defects by american use of depleted uranium. he is also completely responsible for all of the atrocities done by the insurgents and the militias. he is responsible for the beheadings and the kidnappings of journalists and the looting and EVERYTHING bad that happens in iraq. why is he 100% responsible for what happens in iraq? because HE STARTED THE WAR. if saddam hussein were still in power, none of this would have happened. there would not be any insurgents or jihadists. and the one part of iraq where things are going well, the kurdish north, would still have things going well even if saddam were still in power! why? because he hasn’t controlled that part of iraq since 1991! so every time you hear about another atrocity in iraq, done by some terrorist group, try and remember that the real responsibility for all the carnage lies with whoever STARTED the bloody conflict in the first place. and with all his friends and buddies like don rumsfeld, condoleeza rice, dick cheney, scooter libby, karl rove, paul wolfowitz, alberto gonzalez, and everyone at fox news. all of them are directly responsible for this bloody carnage. they are directly responsible for the destruction of the most holy sites in shiite islam. they are directly responsible for inciting tensions between sunnis and shiites to the point of a civil war. because, if the war had not happened in the first place, none of this would have ever happened. that fact, and that fact alone, puts all of the blame for everything that went wrong solely on bush’s shoulders. and for that fact alone, even if he had done everything else perfectly in his entire presidency (which is the opposite of what happened), he should be impeached. because the united states constitution obliges us to abide by international treaties that we sign, and we signed the united nations charter. and according to the united nations charter, the war in iraq is an illegal, pre-emptive, unilateral invasion of aggression. and bush recently came out with a new national security strategy document that re-affirms the central importance of pre-emptive war! what an arrogant butcher he is! according to the u.s. constitution, violating international treaty obligations is an impeachable offense. and judging by the massive carnage in iraq unfolding every single day for the last 3 years, such an impeachment would be richly deserved by the man directly responsible for every single death and injury caused by the war and its aftermath, who to this day is unapologetic about his lies about weapons of mass destruction. and so what if he believed those lies? all that means is he is an idiot who cannot tell fantasy from reality! all the more reason to impeach the bastard! so i am watching with great disdain as the cowards in charge of the democratic party distance themselves from the courageous and noble senator from wisconsin, russell feingold, and his motion to censure the president for his unconstitutional domestic wiretapping program. and the republicans are all such brain-dead syncophant zombies, it makes my blood boil listening to their nonsensical jeering about this censure motion. they talk as if it is treasonous to dare to question the commander-in-chief at a time of war. complete and utter nonsense! what is treasonous is NOT to question the bastard, and to sit idly by while people are dying and our constitutional rights are taken away one by one. and the most treasonous person of all is our commander-in-chief himself, who is directly responsible for taking away many of our civil liberties while using torture to instigate terrorism that he can pretend to “defend” us from! this notion that we cannot question the commander-in-chief while at war is so utterly ridiculous, on so many levels, that whenever a republican says it, i wonder how they manage to have the basic cognitive ability to speak and understand the english language in the first place! what if president bush suddenly decided to pre-emptively nuke north korea, iran, russia, china, india, pakistan, israel, the united kingdom, and france, all at the same time? would they still say that we cannot question the commander-in-chief at a time of war, up until the moment they are blown to smithereens by the massive nuclear counterattack? or maybe they would finally realize, hey, the fact that there is a war going on means that there is that much MORE reason to question our commander-in-chief, not LESS! i mean, DUH! somebody should start a store where functional human brains capable of rational thought can be purchased in exchange for money, and invite republicans to pay a visit. i mean, seriously...

going through hell

i’m pretty much going through hell right now, with panic attacks. it’s gotten to the point where i have them almost every day. and it’s the usual: i think i’m dying, i become a hypochondriac, heart racing, uncontrollable shaking all over my body, stiff painful muscles, heavy sweating, tingling hands, diarrhea, flatulence, belching, strange pains all over my body, wet hands and feet, feeling hot and cold at the same time, racing thoughts, a feeling like i am going to black out, and an overwhelming fear that i am about to die in less than 5 minutes. i hate panic attacks more than anything else in the world. why on earth do i keep having so many of them? i can’t calm myself down when i have one, and rational thought does nothing to help me. if i explain away my physical symtoms as those of a panic attack, and think about how panic attacks are safe and don’t harm me, and work my best to calm down, then all of a sudden the panic attack comes back 100 times stronger, overpowering me, and then i am thinking, holy shit, maybe i’m wrong, maybe this time i really am dying, because i never remember having one this powerful before. i start wondering if people have actually done scientific studies to prove that panic attacks never kill anyone, and thinking that i may turn out to be the exception that proves the rule. i start thinking i have tardive dyskinesia or serotonin syndrome or some other horrible side effect of the medicines i take to prevent panic attacks from happening in the first place. i have to go to the bathroom so many times and shit so many times and wipe my ass so many times it gets sore and starts bleeding. and i can’t eat food because i would immediately vomit it back up. panic attacks are pure hell. i wouldn’t wish them on anyone except those who commit genocide. they are worse than death could possibly be. because in a panic attack, it is like you are locked into the final throes of agony in death, stuck there in limbo, perpetually almost about to die, but you never quite get around to finishing dying, and then, paradoxically, after a while the attack starts to go away, and you un-die, and turn into the un-dead. there have been so many times i thought for sure i was dying, i lost count long ago. at least several dozen, probably 100 or even 200. it will be so anti-climactic when i actually die, because i have experienced it so many times. except that time the physical sensations might be a little different. but i am sure a lot of it is the same. the uncontrollable shaking, the overwhelming fear, the heart racing, all the sweating, vomiting, diarrhea... the same stuff all happened to my dog mokka when she died, probably happens to people too. but the thing that really makes it scarier than you could possibly imagine is, i don’t believe in god or satan or heaven or hell or anything like that. for me, death is the final end. so it is a hell of a lot scarier for me than for a bible-thumping christian to deal with. if you are a true christian, there is no reason to have any fear whatsoever, because your faith in god’s salvation is enough to move mountains. but i don’t have that luxury. i can’t innocently pretend the world is flat or that the sun orbits the earth. i know reality. and in reality, death is real. it is a real thing that happens. it is the end of life. and there isn’t any more life for you, after you die. and that is a very, very bad thing. but there is nothing we can do to change it. and i am so frightened of death, i am constantly thinking i have medical problems, and i am a hypochondriac, and always thinking i am about to die. it is really quite awful. i can see quite easily why people like to believe in a god that obviously doesn’t exist. it would give me a hell of a lot of comfort if i believed in that. but, unfortunately, i think belief in god or an afterlife is self-contradictory and ridiculous, having come up with several mathematical proofs of this, a few of which i shared with everyone in a previous blog post here if you are interested. i am not happy or glad about god not existing, i don’t think it is anything to celebrate, in fact it is a very bad thing, but there is nothing we can do about it. there is nothing we can do to bring god into existence, because he simply cannot exist. and we cannot evade death forever, only for a certain number of years before our time runs out. and for me, i am constantly on high alert, thinking my time has run out, when it hasn’t yet, and this is ruining those few years which i am granted the high privilege of existence as a sentient being on this great and wondrous planet of earth. nothing would please me more than to believe in god and heaven, but i feel it is simply beyond the scope of that in which i can believe. last night i actually went so nuts i called 911 since i really thought i was dying. they ended up sending not just an ambulance, but also a policeman. boy was i embarrassed! all the trouble i put them through, just to deal with my psychological inadequacies. i apologized to them of course, but they said it was their job to deal with people like me, and do stuff like that. oh well. and i didn’t even have to pay them anything! it was free! a lot better than the other times before i called 911 and got sent to hospitals because i thought i was dying... i had to pay through the nose for that shit! most of the time when i think i am dying, i have to convince myself that my death isn’t as important a consideration as the money i would waste on an ambulance and hospital bill if i were taken to the e.r... and that is a hard sell! i can’t think straight when i have panic attacks, and i am usually at least a little panicky all the time, just on the brink of an attack but not really having one. this is no way to live, and i have to find some way to cure myself of these panic attacks. my parents bought me these 5 hypnosis recordings, and i listened to the one about panic attacks once already. the guy in them has a british accent. they are from hypnosisdownloads.com. it calmed me down a whole lot when i listened to it, but i don’t know if it will have much of a permanent effect. i should probably listen to it every day. sometimes i just feel as if my head will explode, and there will be blood and guts and bits of brain tissue scattered all around the room. although that never actually happens to anyone in real life, i still think about things like that. i wonder why. and if i have come so close to the brink of death so many times, or at least thought that was what was happening at the time, why is it that i always miraculously find a way to survive completely unharmed (except emotionally)? isn’t that a miraculous coincidence, that i could be close to death so many times and survive unharmed every single time? of course i am being sarcastic, since none of those times i was really in any danger, i was just deluded into thinking i was. i just wish i knew more about medicine, because whenever i try to explain how i am dying to a doctor or nurse or paramedic or psychiatrist or whoever, they always find my explanations ridiculous and in direct contradiction of vast amounts of medical research. whether i say i am having a heart attack, or a ruptured spleen, or serotonin syndrome, or an aneurysm, or whatever, they always find something that directly contradicts it. like... “people with that condition can’t walk and talk and remember what their birthday is and tell people what their name and address are.” and, when you think you are dying, and you find out the probable cause of your imminent death is impossible given your current abilities at your current stage in the dying process, it is a real let-down, and just confuses you even more. and you are left to wonder, so what the hell am i dying from, anyway, if that’s not it? later on, the next day, when you feel fine, the whole thing seems ridiculous, in retrospect. i just wish i didn’t have to go through the panic attacks in the first place, to find that out. how many more times do i have to die and miraculously live to tell about it? i am getting really sick and tired of this crap, and it is starting to really piss me off. i feel like writing myself a letter of complaint, or suing myself in a court of law. because i have experienced what i am doing to myself with these panic attacks and i just cannot abide such a brazen defiance of acceptable conduct. these panic attacks are utterly despicable and i condemn them in the harshest possible terms. they need to stop happening and never happen again, ever. or else i will be forced to have more of them, for revenge. or something. i forgot. dammit. anyway, i hate panic attacks. period. they are awful. if hinduism is correct, i probably was a real bastard in my past lives. luckily hinduism is ridiculous and false, and there is no such thing as karma, which means good people can suffer while bad people can be happy. for me, my religious unbelief ties in very closely with my panic disorder. but i cannot abide by believing in something i know to be false, even if this would help get rid of panic attacks. it is just too much of a stretch for me, even though i am often perfectly fine having the false belief that i am dying from some medical condition i don’t really have, i just want to have as few false beliefs as possible, because that way i can stay more reality-oriented in my approach to life.
when you have frequent panic attacks, your grasp on reality is very tenuous, so you want to grab onto as much reality as possible to believe in. that’s how it is for me, anyway.

the man who killed the monroe doctrine

for 200 years, the united states has tried to rule latin america, under the monroe doctrine, successfully turning virtually every country in latin america into a satellite state of the united states. things started to crack under john f. kennedy when fidel castro became the leader of cuba and was able to preserve communism as its system of government, in open defiance of us, right near our border. but we kept our cool. it was the cold war, and you were either with us or the soviet union. under leaders like ronald reagan, we killed anyone else who opposed us, like the sandinistas in nicaragua, or salvador allende in chile, and brought to power people like augusto pinochet, in an axis of evil right-wing dictatorships, all across latin america. but in the late reagan era, through the bush and clinton years, the dictatorships crumbled, one by one, as the cold war came to a close. the spectre of communism was no longer the guiding hand of foreign policy. so, one by one, they all became peaceful, pro-united states democracies, allied with us (except for cuba, of course). the monroe doctrine was still going strong.

then george w. bush, the most incompetent man ever to be president of the united states, came to power. through his mismanagement and utter stupidity, he managed to alienate the rest of the world, even canada! that takes genius! meanwhile, in venezuela, another man named hugo chavez had been elected president, a decade after trying to overthrow another venezuelan government in a military coup. in 2002, a coup d'etat by right-wing elements closely allied with the u.s. state department was dispatched within 2 days by president chavez, and they were all found guilty of high treason. since that time, hugo chavez has, by all accounts, consolidated his power, put in place a “permanent bolivarian revolution”, and spread this revolution all across latin america. for starters, he has made cuba and venezuela closer allies than any 2 countries could possibly be, and fidel castro is his best friend. he is the most charismatic and enigmatic figure in latin american politics, and people are left wondering, is he a hero or a villain, a liberator or a tyrant?

we do not yet know the answer to that fully, but what we do know is, hugo chavez is very powerful, and getting more powerful all the time. he has exported his socialist revolution all across latin america, and his friends are now in charge of brazil, ecuador, chile, bolivia, argentina, uruguay, and, of course, cuba. latin american leaders are talking about integration, the same way that the european union has been done in europe. venezuela recently joined mercosur, a free-trade bloc in south america, which is looking to expand into other types of integration besides free trade. and, in any such grouping, hugo chavez, of course, would be the one in charge, and the others would all follow the way. his rhetoric is staunchly anti-bush and anti-capitalist, and he regularly accuses the u.s. government of plotting to overthrow him, while continuing to flaunt his high-profile friendship with fidel castro, just to rub it in our face that we can’t overthrow him anymore. that’s right... his security services are so good, and his power is so consolidated, the cia can’t even orchestrate another coup attempt on him. hugo chavez is practically unstoppable. his country has vast petroleum reserves, and he owns citgo, one of the largest gas-station chains in the united states. every time you buy gas at the capitalist company citgo you are funding his socialist revolution.

in the next 15 months, new elections are scheduled in almost all of the countries in latin america, and chavez-allied socialists are expected to win in almost all of those elections. things are about to reach the point where there are more countries in latin america in chavez’s sphere of influence than in bush’s sphere of influence. once we have control of less than half of the hemisphere, we can officially declare the monroe doctrine dead. and the man who killed it, for good or for bad, is hugo chavez.

so, you may be interested to know, hugo chavez is also allying his country with all the rogue nations that the united states has singled out, especially with iran. despite all the controversial statements of iran’s new president, and iran’s continued pursuit of nuclear weapons, hugo chavez is pursuing a closer alliance with iran. he has said he wants to replace the “axis of evil” with an “axis of virtue”, whatever that means. in any event, he is free to do whatever he wants, because the united states cannot get europe to go along with us in trying to take him out, because the europeans are all socialist too. most notably spain, the former colonial ruler of most of latin america.

so, who is going to end up as the only country in the western hemisphere that isn’t socialist? the united states, of course. and maybe we will be able to find a way to persuade at least a few of those smaller countries to go along with us. but the big ones? brazil and mexico? forget it. they are definitely headed towards socialism. and all we can do is sit back and wonder how bush managed to screw up something that previous presidents worked 200 years to set up. oh, and canada, our neighbor to the north? they recently elected a center-right party to power, but even the people in the center-right party in canada are still diehard socialists. we won’t have any friends to share the glories of capitalism with anymore. oh, those were the days...

and as for the united states, whether we will someday join in too and become socialist like everyone else, i think so. it will happen eventually. the true conservatives have already woken up and realised that the democrats and republicans have both already become corrupted by socialist ideology. they can tell that president bush is not really a capitalist. his medicare prescription drug benefit proved it. but bush is not a socialist either. he is just an idiot. an idiot digging capitalism’s grave. so, when the historians write their history books, and write about the great battle of ideas, the battle for hearts and minds, what will the epitaph for capitalism be? how will they phrase the obituary of the “social science” called economics, once it is finally rejected from academic institutions for being pseudoscientific political rubbish, a combination of bad math and bad politics that people merely use as a diversionary tool to argue for whatever political viewpoints they espouse? especially considering the field of economics was pretty much started by franklin delano roosevelt for political reasons, and has never risen above that level? what will be the epitaph for ayn rand’s philosophy of objectivism, or for the libertarian movement?

i propose “capitalism and communism: two polar opposites, many striking similarities, neither one right.” because capitalism is meaningless without communism existing as something to contrast it against, just as communism is meaningless unless you can contrast it against capitalism. if capitalism were the only possibility, it would not exist as an idea, because people would just take it for granted, and not even think on those terms. the fact that much of the 20th century was a great conflict between the two great economic ideologies should give us pause. if such a conflict existed in the first place, and there was no clear winner for such a long time, doesn’t that logically imply that neither one of the 2 opposing ideologies could possibly be correct? they are both such stark, irrational, absurd, extremist positions to take. there are much more moderate and reasoned approaches, where you try to take the best of both and discard the worst of both, and they are all collectively referred to as forms of “socialism”. socialism is an economic system, not a political one, so it can exist alongside a democracy or a dictatorship equally well. socialism is the economic system in every single wealthy country in the world, except one. the united states. but i see it coming in the future, and whether you vote for democrats or republicans, it will still come, dressed as a sheep or a wolf, it does not matter, because once it takes hold, it will be impossible to ever get rid of. france and germany are 2 examples of countries that are having a lot of problems with socialism but are stuck with it since it is impossible to get rid of without running severely afoul of public opinion. we already have social security and some other programs like that, but that is just the beginning. the main right-wing parties in wealthy socialist countries are all center-right parties that run on a platform of less rapid expansion of social programs. they would never dare even consider making social programs smaller than before, which is considered a far-right position. someday the democrats and republicans will both be socialist, and there will be no going back because of public opinion. that is why hugo chavez’s revolution is so important. because it is an irreversible change that is only the beginning of a huge tide in the future. you are even seeing reports, all through the mainstream media in the united states, about a gigantic gap between the rich and the poor in our own country, and about earnings for the average worker actually going down from one year to the next, while ceo’s make more money than ever. if the media were really so capitalist, they would be able to keep all that on the down-low. so the media, which people claim are all about profit and corporations, really cannot be trusted to be about anything; they are now paving the way for socialism to come to fruition. in any for-profit news organization, there are still bound to be plenty of reporters with other viewpoints, and management can’t shut them up all the time. all i am saying is, people should be aware of this so that they can make plans accordingly. make billions of dollars now, while you still can. because someday, the government will take it all away from you and give it to the poor. but at least you will have a chance to spend it first. just read confessions of an economic hit man to have some idea of the intricate system that hugo chavez is tearing to pieces.

the real anti-americans

the real anti-americans are fred phelps and the congregation of the westboro baptist church in topeka, kansas. they have been dishonoring the memory of our men and women in uniform who fell in combat, because according to their twisted version of christian fundamentalism, the united states is an evil, godless country, and god hates us and sends american soldiers to hell because we are accepting of homosexuality. there are, in fact, a number of other christian fundamentalists across the nation who have that same view of our country, some of whom praise god for letting 9/11 happen, saying that 9/11 was righteous punishment for a sinful nation.

in my opinion, all of these anti-american christian fundamentalists are the real ones who would go to hell if it existed, so they are damned lucky that it does not. the united states does have its flaws, but we must stand by our nation even if we do not agree with the government or with the majority of its citizens on certain issues. there are also many christian fundamentalists across this nation who think george w. bush is some sort of messianic infallible prophet who is doing god’s will. those people are also quite insane, but luckily they are not traitors like fred phelps and his congregation.

recently i saw a speech noam chomsky gave at binghamton university, and while he was very critical of the united states government, and very critical of both the current administration and the former clinton administration, he is still a patriotic american. he said that this country has more freedom of speech and is a freer country than any other country in the world, and he told us all that the reason we have so much freedom is that in the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and in the civil war in the 1860s, freedom-loving people fought and died for the rights that should have been granted to everyone in the first place. the reverend martin luther king, jr. loved this nation despite the many flaws he saw in it, and he knew he would be killed for his beliefs and his actions, but he heroically led a nonviolent movement that achieved victory after his death.

and who led the fight for freedom in the civil rights movement, and in the civil war? it was liberals, the same people who ended the practice of men, women, and children being used basically as slaves in large factories under horrible working conditions, the same people who created government social programs as a safety net for the poor, the disabled, and the elderly, the same people who created the fda to regulate the quality of our food and medicine back when the meat-packing industry and patent medicines were full of abuses. it was right around 1900 when the progressive movement really came full force, and it also brought anti-trust laws to the forefront to break up monopolies and restore capitalism and competition into the marketplace. from liberals like thomas jefferson and abraham lincoln, through theodore and franklin roosevelt, and harry truman and john f. kennedy and lyndon johnson and jimmy carter and bill clinton, liberals have brought us a lot of the good things that we take for granted. the republican party under abraham lincoln and teddy roosevelt was liberal. the democrats under william jennings bryan, the fiery fundamentalist who never got elected president, were very liberal. but liberalism hit its peak in the 1960’s, and since then it has steadily gone downhill, with the resurgence of conservatism. conservatives were the ones who opposed banning slavery, who opposed child laber and worker safety laws, who opposed the creation of the fda, who opposed the creation of social security and medicare, who opposed giving women and blacks the right to vote. throughout history, conservatives have been dead wrong on virtually every major issue, which is why we should never support them. while george w. bush is not a real conservative, he still has many radical followers who advocate policies far to the right of his, policies that would take us back into the dark ages.

so i am grateful that the democratic party will win control of congress in the 2006 elections, because it’s about time. it’s about time somebody taught george w. bush a lesson. not that he is a bad person or anything... he is just arrogant and thinks he knows better than everybody else. his administration does not listen to anyone else, not even to republicans in congress or to republican activists. they just broadcast their message out to everyone and brainwash their followers into agreeing with all their policies. george w. bush is a misguided fool who has the best of intentions but practically no understanding of the consequences of his actions, who lives in a bubble surrounded by syncophants who agree with everything he says and never dare question him. if it weren’t for his interactions with people in congress, foreign leaders, and news reporters, he would never get even an inkling of an idea about what is really going on out there in the real world, because nobody in his administration ever tells him anything that he doesn’t want to hear. it is a classic case of “shoot the messenger”. that is why bush is brain-dead on the issue of arabs controlling our ports, why so many people died in hurricane katrina, why we invaded iraq, why the medicare prescription drug bill was a disaster, why the effort to privatize social security failed miserably, why bush’s compromise on stem cell research made the united states last on the list of countries to do cutting-edge research in, why we still aren’t doing anything about global warming even though the vast majority of bush supporters support the kyoto protocol and believe bush does too, and why the national debt is going through the roof despite so-called “fiscal conservatives” in office (if that even means anything). george w. bush is a classic case of a so-called “enlightened despot” in the model of catherine the great of russia, or henry viii of england, or napoleon bonaparte of france. those despots were called enlightened but really they were just megalomaniacs and tyrants who somehow enchanted the public with their propaganda. but his isolation is keeping him so out of touch from the masses, he is also very much like louis xvi of france; his propaganda, which once was enthralling and often convincing to those who were un/misinformed about the truth, is sounding more and more unrealistic and ridiculous these days, even to his supporters. lately he has been giving speeches praising the advance of democracy in the middle east and condemning terrorism, where he doesn’t address the question of hamas at all, because hamas getting elected is like a fly in the soup of his high-minded rhetoric, one that he doesn’t dare mention because it proves everything he says about the united states supporting democracy in the middle east is wrong. let us hope that when he leaves office, it will be a peaceful, democratic transition out of power for him, either through impeachment or through letting him finish his 8 years in office.

aspies of the world unite!

“aspies” is an affectionate term for people with asperger's syndrome, of which i am one. throughout elementary and high school, i was bullied and treated like dirt, even though i was really smart and had grades that were about as close to perfection as a fallible human could reasonably be expected to get. i did really well in all my classes and did not have to try at all; they were all dirt easy! and i was in the enriched and accelerated and advanced placement classes, the ones for smart people. but someone is just “smart” if they are smarter than maybe half or two-thirds of people. i am smarter than more than 99% of people. i do not say this in any sort of bragging way, because i have a mental disability that goes along with it. my brain is better at some things and worse at other things than an average human brain. asperger’s syndrome has made me very smart in an academic sense, at logical matters, but i am severely disabled socially. it has also allowed me to develop great interest in computer science and math, and all about computers.

people with aspergers are said to have a high-functioning form of autism. there is a lot of negative perceptions and generalizations people have about autism, although most people haven’t heard of asperger’s syndrome, which is just as common. you see, a severely autistic person has various tendencies that are drastically different than a normal, or neurotypical, person. someone with asperger’s falls right in the middle, between severely autistic and perfectly neurotypical. we are just barely normal enough to survive in the real world, but it is a precarious balance. because of our great difficulties in dealing with other people, which is very important these days, we aspies often don’t do very well. however, because people with asperger’s are often brilliant geniuses, some of us are very successful. and that all depends on whether we can capitalize on our particular gifts while minimizing the damage caused by our particular disabilities. asperger’s is a very balanced syndrome, in that it benefits and hurts you in equal amounts, but in different ways.

one example: i have been basically amounting to nothing since i graduated college. jack squat. zero. nada. zip. the null set. and i graduated with a double major in computer science and mathematics, from cornell university, which is perhaps the hardest ivy league school to graduate from. and while i was at cornell, i did remarkably well for a slacker who skipped class and didn’t do homework or any of the required readings. i had an almost perfect memory for every word the professors had ever spoken in class, and could easily call up those memories at a moment’s notice. but i don’t just have great memory. i also have unparalleled logical reasoning skills. and a great capability for abstract thought. but i tend to do better in courses about rigorous mathematical subjects than in courses about subjective things like art or music or history or literature. in fact, my performance in those classes was rather sub-par, since i was not really interested in the subject matter, and didn’t study; mostly i relied on memorization of everything i heard in class. or if i read a textbook, i remember every word i read with a photographic memory of what everything on the page looks like where a certain topic is discussed. i was a real slacker, and just relied on these amazing abilities to get through. and i was a dean’s scholar. at cornell, the dean’s scholars are one of several different groups of students, selected when they accept you to the university to be part of that particular program, who are considered to be smarter than all the other students who don’t get one of those honors. then again, a person does not have to be that smart to get into cornell. i mean, they do have to have above average intelligence, but simply the top 30% or so are good enough to get in. that doesn’t mean anyone is guaranteed to get in, even if they are in the top 10%, because the process of admitting people is very subjective and flawed. there were universities i was not accepted into because i lacked enough extracurriculars. anyway, the dean’s scholars are selected mainly based on the short essay they write on the front page of the application to cornell. whoever writes the best essays gets to be a dean’s scholar, provided they also did really well in school. since i was the valedictorian of my high school, and my grades were a full 3 percentage points higher than the nearest competitor, that part was no issue. as for writing skills, with us aspies, it is a mixed bag. i did very well on essays and term papers up until i got into college, often getting perfect scores (i refused to settle for anything less than perfection, and even a 99% used to make my blood boil). once i was in college, i mostly got c’s. c is for average. standards much higher there. and my real talent is in computers and math.

so anyway, the greatest unsolved question in theoretical computer science is the question of whether p = np, and the clay mathematics institute in cambridge, massachusetts is offering a 1 million dollar reward to anyone who can prove this question one way or the other. and guess what? i came up with a proof, and sent it to them! i actually came up with the proof during my junior year, when i was in the class where these topics were introduced. usually i am several steps ahead of what is taught in class because i logically deduce many things implied by what is taught. so, i was able to independently come up with the idea of the quadratic equation and derive it, in 8th grade, a few weeks before the teacher actually taught that matter, because it was a logical extension of the stuff taught right before. or in 10th grade, i independently came up with the idea of the derivative and calculus, although i only understood the concept as it applied to the function f(x) = e^x, and never thought of applying the same principles to any other functions. those are the 2 main examples from high school. and there is just one example from college. the question of whether p = np.

during that class in fall 2002 semester, professor john hopcroft described to us the concept of the complexity classes p and np, and a class of problems called np-complete. and he told us that the problem of whether np-complete problems are actually in class p is an unsolved problem, that many very smart people have thought a great deal about, for many years, and nobody has been able to find an answer. and he suggested that we all try to come up with proofs one way or the other, as an exercise which he was sure would almost certainly not amount to anything, but would help us learn the material. to add to the incentive, he told us that some multimillionaire is offering a 1 million dollar prize to anyone who solves this, and that great fame and fortune await them, just like the people who solved fermat’s last theorem and the 4-color theorem.

so, like everyone else, i set to work on this problem, and within a few weeks i arrived at a solution. but i became convinced that my solution was somehow incorrect, because my proof was too simple, too obvious, too short and elegant. there had to be something wrong with it that i was not seeing, because i had checked and re-checked and it was all completely logical! but it was so obvious, i was incredulous that nobody had ever solved this problem, with such an obvious answer lying right under their noses. so i kept quiet about it and i didn’t even discuss it with the professor because us aspies avoid social situations that make us uncomfortable more than anything. i never went to office hours for any professors or anything, because i was just not into that sort of thing, as a very shy person.

anyway, recently, my friend mike was telling me about how in this new game he is playing, the sims 2, in the university there is a freshman class entitled “p = np and other simple proofs”. this is obviously a programmer joke because all the programmers took computer science courses and know that is a great unsolved problem that many brilliant people have tried and failed to solve. this reminded me of the fact that i had written that proof, and i started wondering whether my proof was right. i still remembered how my proof went, and started arguing with mike about whether it was right or not. he kept finding flaws in it, but i ended up fixing all of them, and i finally decided to write the whole thing out in a microsoft word document yesterday and get everything in the proof really concrete and written out thoroughly and logically. so i finally did that yesterday, and suddenly realized that i had overcome all of the objections and supposed “fatal flaws” he had found in my proof. it turned out that the whole idea of np-complete problems is a chimera to distract you from the main question of whether p = np, and if you want to prove whether or not p = np, just think about finding a counter-example to the claim p=np, a problem that is in np but not in p. well i had already found that counter-example, in junior year, but the original proof i thought up used the concept of np-completeness in an incorrect fashion and basically was inspired bullshit, very much on the right track, but just a little off. but then i had an epiphany. what if i completely eliminate the very idea of np-completeness from the proof, and just talk about the problem being in np but not in p? that would totally solve the whole problem! and then, i came up with a simple and elegant proof that is flawless.

so, then i had to verify that it is correct, and had myself, my dad, and my friend mike all verify its accuracy. and i emailed the proof to the official contact email of the clay mathematics institute for matters pertaining to this problem, to make it official. but i still have a whole lot more hoops i need to jump through before this thing is done. and that is if my proof is correct. they could still find some sort of weird flaw in it that i hadn’t even thought of, one that would be unrecoverable and make my proof utterly without merit. although i think that is highly unlikely. i did notice that i used the phrase “finite state machine” instead of the phrase “turing machine”, which seems to be the preferred thing to reason about. a turing machine is a type of finite state machine that is special because it can do anything that any other finite state machine can do, if it is a universal turing machine. an electronic computer is an example of a modern-day universal turing machine. there are 2 variants of it: deterministic and nondeterministic. in the real world, computers are all deterministic. but the new technology of quantum computers is nondeterministic.

anyway, the proof was all fixed and i sent it off to the clay mathematics institute in an email. but i have to get it published in a peer-reviewed journal and have the majority of mathematicians find out about and agree with my proof, and have them stay supportive of it for a year or more. all of that before i can collect the million dollars. kind of annoying, having to jump through all these hoops. i don’t even know anything about peer-reviewed journals in the first place. all i know is i solved the greatest unsolved problem in theoretical computer science. but i am not going to show the proof here for anyone to see, it has to get published in a peer-reviewed journal first. and it is going to be really annoying to get that arranged.

in the meantime, i am running out of money and can’t seem to find a decent job. i hope that will change soon. but i might have to get a job in fast food or at a convenience store or something, just to pay the bills. for over a year i have been living off of my life savings, most of which is from money my dad deposits into my bank account every 2 weeks, which he has done ever since i was born. at one point my life savings was over $20,000 but now i am down to the last thousand or 2, and i get bills that are several hundred dollars all the time. credit card bills, cell phone bills, student loan bills, car insurance bills, etc. and it is really frustrating to have to think about how i am running out of money and not going to be able to financially sustain myself unless i get a crappy low-paying job, because it is practically impossible to find a good job.

because of my disorder, i am a creature of habit and feel much better in familiar surroundings, so i have been restricting my job search to the binghamton area all along. i couldn’t just get up and move to a new city in an apartment and start at a brand new job where i don’t know anyone. you see, besides asperger’s syndrome, i also have a severe case of anxiety/panic disorder. any abrupt and major change in my lifestyle causes very severe emotional problems for me, and it would take me a long time to recover. for everything good i have gotten from my intelligence, there is an equal amount of bad that i have gotten from my severe emotional and behavioral problems. really, i don’t have it any better or any worse than the average person out there, because it all cancels out, the good vs. the bad. i am a hypochondriac plagued by panic attacks where i think i have some strange medical problem and am about to die, and i get these attacks all the time. it is not very pleasant thing, when you are so used to thinking you have less than 5 minutes to live that every time you find yourself thinking that you are like “oh no not that again, but maybe this time it is real”. really nobody can know the hell i go through unless they have had severe panic attacks themselves.

but i do know god doesn’t exist. that is another simple, elegant proof. god is defined as all-knowing and all-powerful. if he is all-knowing he can predict the future and knows every decision he will make in the future. but if he is all-powerful he has the power to decide to do things differently than how he predicted. but then the things he knows are wrong. therefore, since his existence is a contradiction, he does not exist. i can think of many, many other proofs that god does not exist, but that is my favorite. another neat one is, since god is also defined as being the creator of the universe and all that exists other than himself, he also created satan and evil, and he is personally responsible for every lost soul that goes to hell, and if he wanted to do things differently so those people didn’t become sinners, he could have, but he did absolutely nothing to prevent that from happening, in fact he knew exactly how everything that would ever happen would turn out back when he created the universe in the first place. so, since god is the ultimate source of all evil, this contradicts him being infinitely good, and therefore he cannot exist. i know christian theologians have a silly retort to this proof, that says that people have free will and that god gave them that gift and to do that he had to create satan and evil, but that it was necessary for the greater good since free will is the ultimate greatest gift that can be bestowed. which is pure bullshit, of course. god’s existence and his ability to predict the future mean that everything is predetermined, which directly contradicts the idea of free will. there are those who claim determinism and free will are compatible, but that is utterly illogical and makes no sense whatsoever. either we make choices every moment, freely choosing from among various different possibilities which could equally well happen, or everything is predetermined to have a certain outcome, and our choices are already predetermined before we are even born. those are the only 2 possibilities. period. case closed, end of discussion, god does not exist. and this second proof ignores the glaring error that god is defined in a self-contradictory fashion, the subject of the earlier proof which is my favorite. christians like to dismiss out of hand these proofs without even giving them serious consideration, whereas i have spent many years thinking about these questions and considering every possibility. especially since i took a philosophy class when i was a freshman in college, where i first heard of the repugnant nonsensical so-called “idea” that free will and determinism are compatible. i think quantum physics has proved that we do in fact have free will, and that determinism is wrong. and if god exists, he cannot predict the future, so he certainly would not be anything like the god most people imagine him to be. that is the only way god can avoid contradictions, by being unable to predict the future; that would also get around my other arguments that god does not exist, and such a god very well could exist, but what is the point? if god cannot predict the future, and is prone to bouts of irrational violence like in the old testament, how on earth could we trust him to hold true to any sort of promises he gives us? just look at what happened to the jews after he promised them everything. oh nothing, hitler killed half of them. what did god to to stop that? nothing. so, anyone who wants to argue in favor of god has got some 'splainin' to do.

so anyway, i need to get a job and get my proof published in a peer-reviewed journal of mathematics or computer science. fun fun fun. it’s amazing how much my life sucks, even though i live a life of great luxury compared to most people worldwide. at least i’ll someday be able to use the pickup line “i wrote a mathematical proof that solved the greatest unsolved problem in theoretical computer science and won me a million dollar prize.” and that is only if my proof is accepted as correct, which is a big if. nothing is certain, you see. it could very easily be rejected, and i am all too used to being rejected by everyone. i should never count my chickens before their eggs are hatched. i had the same problem when i wrote a computer program to predict the stock market. i started having really bad panic attacks every time i even thought about my program and its implications. so i ended up abandoning it entirely, because i just could not take the emotional toll of it. maybe i should revisit that project. maybe. but i am still positive that my program could predict the stock market if i just fixed a few bugs and tweaked some things and fed it in a larger amount of data to analyze. although, unfortunately, my parents don’t believe i could ever write a computer program to predict the stock market. still... what do they know? the stock market isn’t entirely random, there are certain patterns, and the program just needs to be able to decipher what those patterns are and use that to predict future stock behavior in the short term. i know other people have written programs to make money off the stock market, so why can’t i do the same thing too?

anyway, i would like to show solidarity with my aspie brothers and sisters out there. aspie power! aspies of the world unite! insert howard dean-style screech here. this i say as a big supporter of dr. dean, mind you... i can still poke fun at the man even though he is my personal hero. it’s a damn shame what the media and john kerry did to him, but howard dean sure showed them! now he runs the whole democratic party! haha, suckers! guess who is sweeping into power in the 2006 elections? democrats, obviously. and howard dean is the big man in charge. hells yeah! now if only people with asperger’s were in charge of the democratic party, whoops i mean the republican party... they would really screw, i mean fix, things up... what i’m saying is they would fix the election through massive voter fraud... no wait... they already did. funny how exit polls not agreeing with official tallies causes revolutions in former soviet republics like ukraine and georgia, but not in the united states of america, and we call ourselves a “democracy”. for shame! elections here are rigged tighter than a... umm... i can’t say it because it is too offensive. think young girls. whoops, i said something offensive! ok, forget i made a dirty joke...

are we the bad guys?

so here's a story about how 2 men killed a woman. well one of the men is still a boy actually. but weird isn't it? why is it always men killing women and not the other way around? why do men rape women and not the other way around? i’ve never raped and killed a woman. does that mean i am less of a man than men who do so? if testosterone causes psychosis, is that a bad thing?

maybe the media is biased. maybe women really do rape and kill men all the time, but it never gets reported, because of a gigantic conspiracy. maybe the reason practically everyone in prison is male is a gigantic conspiracy against men, to put them into prison and keep women out. but i don’t think that’s the case. i think it’s pretty clear what is going on here.

men want sex. we want to have sex with women. but men are also too embarrassed to ask women out very often, unless they are the sort of men who don’t have any trouble with that. but the sort of men who do not have any trouble with asking women out are the sort who have a very low opinion of women so they don’t think they are losing much of anything worthwhile if they get turned down. men who have a high opinion of women, like me, are often too shy to ask them out, because we actually think women matter and it bothers us that things might not go the way we want them to.

in either case, most men have a tendency to view women as sex objects, either as idols of perfection, such as supermodels and the like, or as worthless whores, which is how guys who are “playas” tend to view their numerous sex partners. there doesn't seem to be much in between. and in either case, our testosterone drives us to have very irrational viewpoints regarding women. but is it really just testosterone?

no... the media and the culture all promote this same viewpoint. the phenomenon is a self-reinforcing cycle. competition between men over a limited number of attractive women makes men hostile towards one another. this hostility is often displayed overtly, in fistfights and the like. but a lot of men are also quite hostile towards women. the reason is quite simple.

if a woman is pretty, a man normally assumes that she is way out of his league. still, men are nice to pretty women most of the time, because a man's feelings are hurt much more easily by a beautiful woman than by anyone else, so men are careful not to provoke beautiful women into hurting their feelings. but many men never talk about their feelings or open up; instead they usually keep everything locked up inside.

and what are the reasons some men might become hostile towards women? number 1, for turning us down. number 2, for requiring so much nice behavior from us, when we don't feel so nice inside. number 3, because men are expected in our culture to pursue women, and not the other way around, and a lot of men resent this fact, and resent the fact that women don't come after them all the time. it’s just not fair, we think. but are things really any better for women than they are for men? regardless of the facts, a lot of men really do think so, and the ones that get the angriest about these various supposed grievances end up committing horrible crimes.

but what is life really like if someone is a woman? as a man, i really have no idea. i mean, there have been times when women actually talked to me about it, but it was boring and i tuned it out. but women still seem so mysterious to me. it’s very weird. but this is all because of our culture and the media. there is a lot of sexism everywhere and our notions of gender norms are brainwashed into us by everyone around us, starting on the day we are born. in fact, this very blog post could be misinterpreted as sexist, when really it is just a commentary on the current sad state of affairs on the roles of both genders, which could very well be different from what it was like in the past or will be like in the future.

i know many girls and women apparently seem to be obsessed with their personal appearance. it is quite strange really, this obsession of theirs, but they look so nice. well, some of them, at least. not all women look nice. but the ones that do, really do. but why? what is the point of looking nice? all this effort put into looking nice shows that those women who are obsessed with their personal appearance have very little understanding of men.

now, remember what most men want? sex with women, right? but most men aren't too particular about which women they are willing to do it with. oh they say they are, but that is just bullshit, because if a guy flat out told people that he would have sex with anyone, he would be ridiculed. men might use physical appearance as the main basis to decide whom they pursue, but as for when a woman goes after a man, things work totally differently. practically any guy, if a woman flat out asked him for sex, would say yes, to practically any woman that would do this to him. it seems to me like there are only 4 possible reasons why he wouldn’t. number 1, he could be gay, or a eunuch, or something other than your average heterosexual. gay guys are a whole different story than regular guys, but rest assured they are just as messed up in the head as everyone else, if not more so, because of all the unjustified discrimination they have to put up with. number 2, the guy could have a relationship with someone else that is committed, and be so either so loyal or just so worried about that that he isn't willing to risk sex with anyone else (he could be worried about being found out or worried about feeling guilty). number 3, he could have erectile dysfunction, and be ashamed about it and worried she'd find out, or he could have stds, in which case he doesn’t want to pass them on. number 4, she could be too ugly or too old or have stds or be related to him or be underage or be some other kind of special case. if none of those 4 conditions are met, virtually any man would definitely say yes. which is probably what would happen the vast majority of the time.

women, on the other hand... they seem to be more selective than men. i don’t really know why, but it pisses me off, just like it pisses off other men. even so, we also get pissed off when women are not selective enough, and they settle for guys who aren’t good enough instead of choosing us, because we know we are better than those other guys they are with. in any event, we men will usually find some reason to be really pissed off, and then try to act like we aren't pissed off about anything. this is just our nature, to get pissed off by things, whether or not they make sense to get pissed off about. some men express their anger and frustration with abusive behavior towards others, while more responsible men find ways to calm down and keep their anger inside, without taking it out on other people. some men might just be disappointed or saddened, rather than angry. but usually when recovering from sadness or disappointment, people go through a stage of anger anyway.

but there are actually more women than men in this country, and it stands to reason that women should be less selective than men. so maybe they really are, and maybe the women who are very selective are a statistical aberration. but what of it? it does not really matter, if the ratio is close enough to 1:1. what really matters is that most women really are heterosexual, and they really do, for some strange reason, like men. i don’t understand it, it seems quite silly, but for some reason they actually like us. quite bizarre, if you ask me, because i don’t see why anyone would possibly like a guy; i dislike all males, including myself and every other person of my own gender. but, it’s a good thing that they like us. what is not a good thing is, most women’s whole approach towards guys who come on to them. women seem to instinctively want to reject everything, just reject, reject, reject. they seem to always be waiting for some sort of mystical knight in shining armor who will be very different from all the other men, and they will love him. now, some women have obviously learned not to reject everything, and they have learned to become sluts, and then they become the object of ridicule, because society is sexist and doesn’t show some people the respect that everyone deserves. i don’t really understand why we like to put down women who are very promiscuous, because i think it is much better for women to be promiscuous than to remain celibate, is it not? society does not condemn men who are very promiscuous, but for some reason if a woman is, everyone wants to insult her, as if there is something wrong with women being promiscuous but nothing wrong with men being promiscuous. i, for one, think there is nothing wrong with anyone being promiscuous, and it makes a lot of sense from a darwinian perspective, because you want to have as many offspring as possible to pass on your genes. we should stop passing judgement on people just because their lifestyles seem immoral to those of us who are closed-minded bigots.

anyway, it seems that modern society has very rigid gender roles and we need to break out of them in order to function better. but i reject “feminism” for no other reason than for its name. how can it claim to be about equality, when the very word is the suffix -ism applied to the root "feminine"? feminine is a very woman-oriented word, and does not say anything about men. that word ignores men’s existence entirely. why are there channels on tv for women, or tv news segments about women’s health, but no channels for men or information on men’s specific health needs? why is breast cancer mentioned in public so much more often than prostate or testicular cancer? and why was it such a big deal when a woman who was a cold-blooded killer on death row was put to death? was she in any way less guilty than a male murderer? why does society show such indifference to all the men killed in combat, and instead focus on a few women like jessica lynch and sensationalize their stories? why is it so important in the news when a woman goes missing, but nobody cares if a man goes missing? remember on the titanic, women got to live and men died. but all most feminists care about is helping women, at men’s expense. so, i reject any so-called “feminism”, since much of it is just the rantings and ravings of embittered lesbians who hate men in general. those among the feminists who hate men have probably had very bad personal experiences of being abused by men, or seen it done to other women, but they do not realize that their prejudice makes them into bigots too, since they take the actions of a few individuals and use it to generalize about everyone of an entire gender. i realize that there is also a lot of feminism that is good, and really does promote equality, but feminists seem to turn a blind eye to those among them who are female chauvanist pigs. i embrace what people usually define feminism as, though. i embrace the idea of equality and breaking free from our roles and all of that. and i do think we need to be accepting of people who have different sexual orientations, although i do stress that those other orientations are maladaptive from the standpoint of darwinian evolution. to be adaptive in a darwinian setting, someone has to be able to produce offspring with other people who are adaptive, and the offspring will likewise be adaptive because of the genetics. homosexuality is maladaptive in darwinian terms because there is no way for homosexuals to produce offspring with each other naturally, so they cannot pass on their genetic material to future generations. the only way a homosexual can have offspring is by having sex with someone they don’t enjoy it with, and that can't go on for too many generations before someone calls it quits, and that ends the whole homosexual bloodline (if we assume homosexuality is genetic in origin). if homosexuality is not genetic in origin, however, then it makes no sense to consider heterosexuals and homosexuals (as well as bisexuals, asexuals, and transsexuals) as born that way. and since most people agree homosexuals are born that way, it stands to reason that it is probably genetic in origin, especially since researchers were able to find a gene in fruit flies that makes male fruit flies with that gene be homosexuals 100% of the time. if it were caused by the environment instead of genetics, then people would be able to easily be taught to switch from one sexual orientation to the other, but that simply does not work, as the massive failures of the groups set up to convert homosexuals into heterosexuals has shown us.

although perhaps homosexuality really is an adaptive gene to have in darwinian terms. come to think of it, homosexual men seem a lot more comfortable expressing themselves freely around women than regular men. perhaps homosexuality is a working strategy at getting people of the opposite sex to have sex with you: if you don’t really want to do it and aren’t really interested, that makes it a whole lot easier than if you have an almost uncontrollable urge to do it! and homosexual men have probably been using this strategy for millennia! like recently in the news isaac mizrahi, a gay fashion designer, felt up the boob of scarlett johansson, a buxom young actress. perhaps most gay people are not 100% gay, and this is the secret to how they pass on their genes. i can see how being gay can really work as a way to get women. the only problem is, the women will have to convince the men to suppress their gayness, and find what shreds of heterosexual urges they might have repressed deep down inside. i know historically primitive societies like the ancient jews knew about gayness and made it punishable by death (just read the old testament), which i think actually helped gay people reproduce, since it forced them to live their lives out as if they were heterosexual, and have children, and all that (most of them were probably too afraid of being put to death to do any differently). if we become more accepting of gays, perhaps eventually they will cease to exist, once we are no longer demanding they live straight lifestyles. why would this happen? if you assume darwinian evolution is still taking place and homosexuality is genetic in origin (which both make perfect sense), it is a logical conclusion to draw. in each generation, fewer and fewer homosexuals would reproduce with the opposite sex, and eventually the gene that causes it would become so rare as to be statistically insignificant. but i for one am glad there so many gay men out there: it puts the odds in my favor for getting straight women! whenever i see a gay man, i should thank him, for doing his part to skew the odds in my favor.

anyway, back to men and women. men tend to be the aggressive ones that commit most of the crimes, it seems. and psychologically, i really do think a lot of the basis for it is from sex, or rather the lack thereof. i think most problems in human society are caused as a result of lack of sex, and if we had more sex it could solve many of our problems. lack of sex is what drove that man to get that woman to come to his home and then tie her up with his nephew's help and then rape and kill her. if he had been having sweet lovin’ all along, none of that would have ever happened. has anyone noticed that terrorists all seem to be young men who never get laid? maybe some sex would get them to stop being terrorists. for people like osama bin laden, it would take more sex, than for his young followers. it would probably take 73 virgins. because 72 is what he thinks awaits him in muslim heaven. 73 would be one more, and tip the balance in favor of not being a terrorist anymore. as for problems women suffer that men don’t have to deal with, a lot of them would all go away if women just did 2 things: 1) stop worrying about their looks because it doesn’t matter as much as they think. 2) only vote for other women, and only work for companies run by women. and if you can’t find someone to vote for or somewhere to work, run for office, or start your own company. pretty soon every politician in office and every ceo would be a woman. oh, and i should probably add a 3rd, to tell women how to solve the problem of men who rape and kill them: 3) have consensual sex with the men that nobody else does it with. that keeps them from becoming too deranged in their isolation. and if they are a loony, throw them into an asylum. problem solved.

as for men’s problems, there is just 1 (weird how men have less problems to solve?): 1) stop worrying and just find someone to have sex with already! (of course this only applies to men who have this problem, and plenty of men already have enough sex.) that’s all there is to it; it isn’t really all that complicated to do. well ok, maybe i should add another. 2) don’t do stupid things. number 2 covers a whole lot of things for men that don’t apply to women. since women aren’t the ones who usually do stupid things. reckless, crazy things, the type that men tend to do a lot more than women. don’t do them. it’s not right, and it won’t help improve our public image, which is bad enough already. the image of men is so bad, we probably have lower public approval ratings than blacks or muslims do in this country. blacks because of the disproportionate percentage of criminals who are black, muslims because of the disproportionate percentage of terrorists who are muslim, and the overwhelming majority of all those criminals and terrorists are... wait a minute... men? that is where feminists need to help instead of being part of the problem. help by showing equal amounts of care and compassion for people of both genders and their particular circumstances, rather than picking one side over the other. because most feminists have picked the side that matches the word that they define improperly (“an effort to bring equality and justice to men and women, for the benefit of all concerned”) which is their name. a more accurate definition of most feminism would be “an effort to help women by hurting men, in what is perceived to be a zero-sum game”. and that will never work, because most men, and probably most women too, would wholeheartedly reject such a sexist approach to this issue. and there is no way i would ever support a movement with a name like “feminism”. you might as well ask me to support islamism even though i am not a muslim! good day sir/madam! you can define one gender as good and the other as evil, but that is just pure nonsense, since really we are all the same inside. well, not entirely the same, since certain internal organs are different (prostate, uterus, etc.). anyway, most things are all the same inside. we just don’t know exactly which ones they are quite yet (mitochondrial dna? a vas deferens between men and women?). but, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. there are known knowns, and known unknowns, and unknown knowns, and unknown unknowns. see... there's an old saying in tennessee... i know it's in texas, probably in tennessee... that says, fool me once, shame on... shame on you... fool me... you can't get fooled again.

corporate lobbying is self-destructive

it is often noted that large corporations have very advanced systems for lobbying the government to pursue policies that these corporations believe is in their own self-interest, and that this has very deleterious effects on the general well-being of the populace. what is not so often noted is the possibility that corporations are actually harming themselves by doing this.

you see, there is a great deal of government regulation out there. this regulation often prevents small businesses from expanding, but large corporations have the resources to deal with it. regulation basically serves as an anti-competitive tool to help corporations keep new competitors from coming into existence.

corporate lobbyists, on the other hand, lobby for deregulation, because they do not want the government telling their corporations what to do. this is actually the exact opposite of the corporations’ best interests, because deregulation would allow new competitors to arise. note that in perfect competition, the ideal form of capitalism, no corporation makes any profit at all, whatsoever, because the competition is so fierce and the consumers are so efficient at seeking out the best deals.

so, any corporation that lobbies government to deregulate its industry is basically trying to commit suicide. in the short-term it may get sweetheart deals with the government that only apply to it, but eventually those will be done away with in the long run. but if they succeed in getting themselves deregulated, they may relegate themselves to returning to their origins and shrinking back down into small businesses again. in the long run of course.

what keeps this from happening is that the government keeps on creating new regulations to replace the old ones that are done away with, and the corporations probably realize that much of the regulation actually helps them. case in point: the chinese government has a regulation called gb18030-2000 that requires any software sold in china to meet these outrageously difficult language requirements. this regulation is very difficult for any software maker to comply with unless they are a very large organization. microsoft is complying, of course, and they will be the main beneficiaries of this chinese government policy. even so, microsoft didn’t want this policy enacted and tried to fight it for a while, because they didn’t understand how it benefited them.

another example? enron, of course. enron did a very excellent job at lobbying the government to deregulate their industry. and what was the logical result of this outcome. oh nothing. enron just went bankrupt. that’s what you get for toying with something you don’t understand.

so the best friends of large corporations are, in fact, the liberals and green party members who hate large corporations and want to tightly regulate them. because these types of policies benefit large corporations more than anything else possibly could. if we really wanted to do the corporations in, we could simply give into their demands for deregulation, and soon enough, they would all go bankrupt from all the new competition. the institutional bureaucracy would slow down the large corporations and tie their hands by keeping them from being as profitable as the rapidly expanding new businesses, and it would be their ultimate downfall. the lesson? be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.

so the next time you wonder about why prescription drugs are so expensive, try and remember how all the regulations of the food and drug administration really only help the large pharmaceutical corporations. but, would you really want to live in a world without drugs being regulated for safety, or without extensive research and development on new drugs? i think not. so, in a way, large corporations are a necessary evil, and we should help them out by regulating them.

thoughts on congress

congress has just rejected a proposal to have independent oversight of lobbying reform. what are my thoughts on this?

“it could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly american criminal class except congress.” - mark twain

“suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of congress. but i repeat myself.” - mark twain

“congress is the opposite of progress.” - anonymous

re-deleted old blog

they brought back my old blog earlier today, but since i want to get rid of it, i re-deleted it. permanently. so, it no longer exists. it doesn't make any sense for me to have more than one blog, now does it? and that one doesn't allow comments, whereas this new one lets anyone leave a comment! check out these happy faces, both white and black! pretty cool eh?!? that's unicode for old characters ibm put into dos oem code page 437! happy face time! hells yeah! the two faces living together in peace and harmony! w00t! my old blog didn't support that kind of advanced shit! this is what moving to a better webhost does for you, it lets you make happy faces! only a 1337 h@x0r can do this kind of stuff! check it out y'all, check it check it out y'all...

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this is my new blog

ok, this is my new blog. hooray for my new blog! yes! my blog is no longer mcgrew.blog-city.com. they deleted that account, probably because of the most recent post. my most recent post was a “disclaimer”. writing that post was a big mistake, but in the end i am glad about it. it said that nothing on that blog was true and it was all a parody and that i wasn’t really who i said i was. i was trying to do something commonly referred to as “covering your own ass”, but it kind of backfired. if i wasn’t really the person who posted that stuff, it couldn’t count against me, right? because, i had posted some stuff that i wasn’t sure was accurate, or that made me sound stupid. well... actually a lot of stuff like that. so, i wanted people to think that it wasn’t really my blog, if they randomly came across it, even though it really was my blog. anyway, blog-city.com (and i am sure blogspot.com too) does not allow for one person to fraudulently claim to be someone else and have a blog. as i explained, my disclaimer merely existed to create the false impression that i am not me, so that the stupid things i said wouldn’t count against me, even though i really am me, and that’s why i didn’t like the idea of stupid things i say counting against me. i like the idea of having freedom in a blog to address any topic, and i didn’t really feel like i had that, because i kept overstepping the bounds of good taste, rationality, and “truthiness”. anyway, for the record, i would like to say that i really am rich mcgrew, the same one who owns the domain name richmcgrew.com and that i ran mcgrew.blog-city.com and now i run richmcgrew.blogspot.com and i really am who i say i am and that this can be verified.

but, now i have a new blog and i am a new man, and i will try and keep my blog posts a bit nicer now. a bit more polished. a larger font, too. the font it tries to use first is arial unicode ms, then lucida grande, then microsoft sans serif, then tahoma, then arial, then bitstream vera sans, then helvetica, and lastly generic sans-serif. arial unicode ms is a superior font that comes with microsoft office xp and later versions and includes virtually every character, lucida grande is a nice new sans-serif font in mac os x, microsoft sans serif is in windows xp, tahoma is in everything back to windows 95, arial is found in both the archaic windows 3.x and the archaic mac os 9, bitstream vera sans is a nice-looking free font that comes with linux’s gnome gui system, helvetica is in even older versions of mac os that don’t come with internet explorer as well as in old unix-based operating systems that have neither arial nor the bitstream vera fonts, and the generic sans-serif is necessary to include for completeness’s sake and maximum cross-platform browser compliance. i left out verdana entirely because although i like it better than all those other fonts, it is extremely wide and throws off the layout of most websites if you override them and make them use it. these fonts are all standard-width sans-serif fonts with nothing fancy or weird about them, just the basics. no serifs, no script, no gothic stuff, and they are all quite readable at small sizes even though i use a medium size, which makes it that much more readable. this should make my blog fairly cross-platform and standards-compliant, conforming closely to internationally recognized web usability and accessibility standards. i recommend enabling font smoothing if possible. font smoothing comes with windows 98 and windows nt 4.0 and all later versions, and you can download a free addon to windows 95 from microsoft that will allow you to enable it (this download is only for windows 95, not any other os). if your os is too old to support font smoothing, try the opera web browser, because it does its own font rendering independently from the os. my super-advanced hi-tech inline-style-sheet html coding is fully compliant with the world wide web consortium’s xhtml 1.0 strict document type definition, so it should look maahvelous in any standards-compliant browser such as firefox, opera, or safari (or in internet explorer too, for that matter). here is some unicode text to test out whether this blog supports that stuff: 中国の鳥人 (Chūgoku no chōjin, The Bird People in China). that should look perfect if you have the font arial unicode ms, which you would have if you have microsoft office xp or newer, like i said before. i had to put arial unicode ms first in the list of fonts to enable support for internet explorer, because newer browsers like opera and firefox have a much better css implementation that lets me make another font the default font and use arial unicode ms only for the characters not in the default font... but since internet explorer is so common, out of the goodness of my heart, i made arial unicode ms first in the list, and i also moved bitstream vera sans to near the end of the list, in case a windows user has it installed but not office xp, because bitstream vera sans, while nice-looking, has way too few unicode characters and if i had it earlier in the list this could make things even worse for users of internet explorer, which i would hate to do, since they have so many problems to put up with already.

so i’ve seen that posting here works, and i’ve already edited this post a bit. and i don’t really want my blog-city.com account renewed. i actually prefer for it to stay cancelled, so none of the crap i wrote there gets ressurrected, because it is rather shameful, much of it. and i’m switching to a different service provider because google has, in many ways, earned my respect and admiration, so i sought out their version of blogging. the other two sites i was considering, livejournal.com and xanga.com, are more community-oriented, but limit a lot of features to “premium members” just like blog-city, and i don’t dig that. but i dig google majorly, so i think i will probably dig blogspot.com. and this time, i will definitely allow comments, because then i will get to see who actually reads my blog, and what they think, and it will be more interesting, plus it will keep me honest and keep me from overstepping my bounds as a blogger as i did in the past. i think my old blog would have definitely been a lot less ridiculous if i actually allowed people to comment on all the nonsense i posted there.

so, since it works, i will have everyone who links to my old blog update their links to be to this new one instead. let us put aside the wackiness of my past blog and embrace a new future, a future of writing things that actually make sense! i hope i have the self-control to do it, because sometimes the wackiness in me is just tearing me apart inside and the only way to get rid of it is to express it in the form of a long-winded, nonsensical blog post. and then once i am done posting, i feel relieved of the burden of all of that rubbish bouncing around inside my head, polluting my brain with its absurdity. it is basically a form of mental waste management. and what blog-city.com did when they deleted my account was basically taking out the trash. my only hope is, they do not ressurect it or keep the data around or anything. i hope it has been irreversibly deleted, or will be shortly. because that is the best way to deal with trash, to irreversibly terminate its existence so that it can never rear its ugly head again in the future. i do not really have anything against blog-city.com, after having a blog there for 3 years, except that when a web browser was configured to use a larger font size, the line-height would stay the same, and the lines would be too close together to read. this problem happened in both internet explorer and mozilla firefox, so i knew it was a problem with the site’s coding, and not the browser’s fault. hopefully, with google in charge of the blogger service and blogspot.com, its html coding will be more tautologically enhanced, to ensure maximal browser compliance in accordance with w3c internationally recognized standards of html document conformance. one thing about google that really impressed me is how they have both the co-inventor of the tcp/ip protocol, vinton cerf, who is also the chairman of the board of trustees for the internet corporation for assigned names and numbers, working for them, alongside the co-author of the world’s bestselling artificial intelligence textbook, peter norvig. those are very high-caliber employees, which would only work for a very high-caliber organization. of course, it’s not that hard to be a co-author of a bestselling textbook: for example, my dad is the author of the instructor’s manual for the nation’s bestselling college physics textbook, physics for scientists and engineers, as well as a co-author of the student solutions manual and a contributor to the main textbook itself (whose main author is raymond a. serway, my dad’s boss). that’s not to say my dad doesn’t do an excellent job, but all he had to do to get it was to submit errata and corrections to the publisher’s designated contact person enough so that they decided to pay him. i mean, if you are a professor who can find all the errors in a textbook and submit them to the publisher, then just do it and bam, they hire you and you are now in the textbook business and getting royalties from the sales of the book! pretty cool if you ask me. maybe i could use a strategy like that (start out by helping someone out for free) to get a job. of course, most people probably aren’t quite as gifted as my father at finding and correcting all errors logical, mathematical, grammatical, and typographical. then again, i’m not like most people. i’m a chip off the old block, although i am a lot more irresponsible and wacko than my dad. i don't know where exactly my wackiness (zaniness?) comes from, but the wellspring of it is endless. i could be a comedian, if other people found the same things funny as me, but usually my humor is either above their heads or too reprehensible to be discussed in polite society, or any society at all, for that matter. i will try to elevate the discussion with my blog, and not go for the lowest common denominator like i did with my last blog. wish me luck!