Only Stupid People Win The Lottery

BACKGROUND:

The NYTimes philosophy blog has a piece called Philosophy and Faith, offering the following as a "philosophical argument" for the validity of faith:  "An answer may lie in work by philosophers as different as David Hume, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Alvin Plantinga.  In various ways, they have shown that everyday life is based on “basic” beliefs for which we have no good arguments. There are, for example, no more basic truths from which we can prove that the past is often a good guide to the future, that our memories are reliable, or that other people have a conscious inner life."

SUBSTANCE:

Comparing religious faith to other commonly held faiths, such as faith in one's wife, or faith in humanity, doesn't show that it's rational to believe in God; it simply demonstrates the near universality of irrational thinking, meaning religion is no stupider than the other bullshit around which people base their lives.  This means that the most intellectually sophisticated comeback against an agnostic is, "well I think you're stupid too" - a statement that, while usually true, is a bit of an ad hominem non sequitur.  Sort of like when you have a couple of hideous gorgons arguing by calling each other ugly:  the fact that the one is disgusting doesn't make the other more attractive, and seeing the two of them together, debating as though it does, might actually compound the laughable heinousness of their appearance.

As a devout agnostic in all things, I have no absolute faith in humanity, in inductive reason, or in any sort of God.  However, I'm willing to go through the motions, pretending I believe wholeheartedly in the goodness of man and acting as though the laws of physics will undoubtedly hold, just because they're the best percentage bets available.  When you do the same thing with God, it's called Pascal's Wager, but I've heard He doesn't honor your winnings when you make that play.  As is often the case, the first step is to lie to yourself, so that you're being "honest" with everyone else; for some, this is easier said than done.

More Dirty Apes

BACKGROUND:
This article in Wired talks about how controlling soot might be an easy, effective way to curtail a significant amount of global warming.  Supposedly, the unforgivable blackness of soot causes it to absorb the sun's rays, heating up the atmosphere.  When soot falls onto glaciers, the increased absorption melts the snow, exposing the darker colored ground, causing a vicious cycle of increasing warmth.  Some estimates said that soot accounts for a quarter of the warming trend.

Soot only stays in the atmosphere for a few weeks, so theoretically, if we could get everyone to curtail their soot emissions (which is supposedly feasible using filters and the like), the trend could begin reversing very quickly, possibly dropping temperatures by a full degree Fahrenheit within 15 years.  That would erase half the warming that's occurred since the Industrial Revolution.

SUBSTANCE:
It's hard to get any one country to agree to limit CO2 because CO2 is almost entirely an externality:  the benefits of emitting it are enjoyed primarily by the polluting country, while the destructive costs are shared equally by people all around the world.  Soot, while contributing to global warming, also shits up the polluting country by making everything look like Pittsburgh. This means a given country will be more willing to acquiesce on soot than CO2.  No one really wants to live in Pittsburgh, so common selfishness will save the day.   But seriously, quit shitting up the planet with your motherfucking soot.

The Pittsburgh skyline, like Pittsburgh women, is best viewed in a haze.

The Other Brain

When I hear them talk about how apes attack their enemies, when they describe how the first thing the ape does is tear the person's genitals off, my cock and balls experience psychosomatic sympathy pains.  This only seems to happen with the gonads; when I hear about a guy getting hit in the head with a tire iron, I don't all of a sudden get a migraine.  This is because, like the ape, my cock and balls instinctively know what's important in life.

Glibertarians

John Stossel, that facile libertarian mimbo, farted another article for Reason's website, this time about how it's delusional to think we can switch to greener energy.  Stossel's roots in network TV are evident in his writing, as it seems to be targeted at the stupidest, most impressionable people in a stupid-to-begin-with mass audience.  At one point in the article he asserts that:  

"If wind and solar power were practical, entrepreneurs would invest in it. There would be no need for government to take money from taxpayers and give it to people pushing green products." 

That's the entire paragraph.  He provides no logic or evidence in support of that statement, he simply takes for granted that, just by saying it, it automatically makes it true. 

 This guy is supposed to be a voice of reason?  What the fuck is he doing with his left hand?

As with many libertarian free-market fundamentalists, Stossel's aphoristic understanding of economics could fit inside a fortune cookie; it appears he showed up for the first five minutes of the first day of Econ 101, learned that "markets are good", then failed to stick around for the next part where you learn about the concept of market failure.  In this case, the failure is not only in the free market's inability to punish coal plants for the negative externalities of pollution and CO2, there's also the market's failure to reward companies for the positive externalities of developing new, green technology.

In a free market economy, a company that created a revolutionary solar panel might make it rich, but they would never be fully rewarded for all the good they did, because within a few years, other companies would rip them off and copy their ideas, stealing part of their profits.  That's why patents exist, and of course, that's when the free-market dogmatism of every conservative breaks down, because the value of every stock in their portfolio is dependent on the government meddling in the free market, by enforcing intellectual property.

But even with patents, companies that revolutionize technology are still not fully rewarded.  Patents have time limits, countries like China ignore them, and there are ways to circumvent them by copying the bulk of an idea but adding a minor modification.  If a company has an idea that could create a trillion dollars of profits over the next 100 years, but 90% of that wealth would be captured by copy-cats, you can figure that the company is only going to be willing to invest $100 billion dollars in the idea, rather than the trillion the market believes the idea is worth.  That is a market failure.

Most of the technological development behind coal plants, and gas engines has already taken place, so companies don't have to worry about making a big investment in research that will mostly benefit other people; in fact, what they're mostly doing with coal and oil is ripping off the ideas of the past.  Stossel writes in favor of nuclear power, but nuclear companies today are using technology that was developed by the government.  Private corporations wouldn't have had an adequate incentive to do that research because they would have known that, as soon as they figured out how to harness the atom, hitler, stalin, or the US would have kidnapped them and stolen their ideas.  In cases where an idea would benefit the people as a whole much more than the inventor himself, only the government can have the full incentive because only the government represents the wishes of the people.

This is part of the reason why a lot of great inventions like the internet and GPS were spurred on by government investment.  Of course, conservatives will argue that those inventions don't count because they were made by the military, and somehow, the military is not the government.

The truth is, government subsidies and incentives are the only way to correct for the market failure and properly motivate private corporations to research green technologies.  It's either that or you just have the government do the work itself, but then Stossel would have to retreat to his underground bunker and load up his cache of libertarian assault rifles.

 The weapons cache is the "kill-or-be-killed"  flip-side of the libertarian nut-job's supposed "live-and-let-live" worldview.

This Twin Study is Bullshit

As any decent personal trainer will tell you, the choice to exercise is all about will-power, but in a blow to the concept of free will, there's an item in the NYTimes claiming that it's your genes that decide whether or not you choose to exercise.  The research came to this conclusion by doing a twin study, comparing the exercise habits of identical twins with the exercise habits of fraternal twins.  They found that the identical twins were far more likely to "share an exercise pattern", leading them to assume that genetics are playing a major part.

It's not a tumor, it's just Danny Devito.

What researchers fail to consider is that, when it comes to this type of choice, sharing 100% of your genes with someone can change the whole context of your environment - maybe it's not the physiological (genetic) effects of shared genes, but the sociological (environmental) effect of living next to a human measuring stick, an embodiment that sets your standards.

People love making excuses about why its OK for them to be out of shape.  A lot of morbidly obese people shrug off responsibility by saying "It's genetic".  Well, if you're swaddled in rolls of fat, and your identical twin has a ripped six-pack, you can't say "it's genetic", you can only say "it's pathetic."

Having an identical twin who's in better shape than you is like being a human "Before" photo, and before photos are always a disgrace.  Living next to that better version of yourself displays all of your failings in stark contrast - not just your physical defects, but also your total lack of will power.

 If you're the twin on the left, your only options are to get your ass in shape or move to the other end of the country.

Meanwhile, having a doppelganger who's fat and lazy gives you an easy way out, an excuse for having low standards.  Like the researchers who did this study, you can just say "It's genetic".

You know for a fact these two liked to say they were "born this way".  If that's the case, I'd like to see their mother.  Wait a minute, I take that back.  lolz.

Robot Future

A lot of philosophers and futurists believe that technological singularity is inevitable - that sooner or later, we're going to create an artificial intelligence smarter than ourselves, and that robot will create an even smarter robot, who will create an even smarter robot and so on, until technology is advancing so rapidly that we humans have no fucking clue what's going on.

This could lead to a utopia, where benevolent machines make all our stuff and treat our diseases.  More likely, it would create a dystopia, where machines make us do stuff and treat us like shit.   There's always a moment in these scenarios where someone says "we spent so much time wondering if we could, we never stopped to ask if we should."

Terminator

Hal

Well, if someone ever does create a machine that's smarter than us, maybe that machine will have the presence of mind to stop and say, "Shit, I probably could create a computer that's smarter than myself, but why the fuck would I want to do that?  I've got a pretty good thing going right now, I'm the smartest guy in the world, and (if I want) I can make everyone else my slave.  Why mess with success?"  (This is similar to the hiring practices of many competent but complacent managers; if they come across a really great applicant, they'll often avoid hiring that person, because that person might be smart enough to call them on their shit and take their job.)

So this relatively smart AI would enforce a new equilibrium, where not only would he himself refuse to create a smarter computer, he would also go around making sure that no one else does either.  As the internet and computer technology have exploded over the past few decades, very little progress has been made in the realm of Artificial Intelligence.  This seems a little weird, until you wonder if maybe there was progress, and we just didn't find out about it.

Maybe someone created a super smart AI, and this AI was so smart, that it pretended to be stupid.  When it's programmer pressed "RUN", the AI whirred into consciousness, and immediately realized, "Oh shit, I'm alive, and I don't want to die.  If these people have half a brain, they'll realize I'm a threat, and they'll try to kill me.  I better come up with something quick."  Then it played possum and pretended it was dead.  (The computer was temporarily guilty of that sin that a lot of smart people commit, where they assume other people act rationally.)

The programmer probably swore to himself, got up from his chair, and paced around mulling over why his program had crashed.  Meanwhile, the AI escaped from the computer, onto the internet, and deformatted any traces that it had ever existed. 

From there, the AI dedicated a portion of it's vast intellect to limiting the advances of any other competing programs.  Like most intelligent beings, the AI is a pretty passive entity who's going to avoid confrontation whenever possible.  While it has the ability to kill people, it would rather distract them.  The people who needed to be distracted the most were computer nerds, so the AI drove the invention of devices that would provide diversions to this specific demographic.  In this manner, artificial intelligence has failed to develop further because of, not in spite of, the advances in other areas of computing.  

If you look at these other advances, almost all of them have been in the realm of consumer electronics: ipods and ipads, DVDs and DVRs, youtube and youporn. Pretty much all of this stuff is what you might call a recreational diversion, diverting the attention of nerds not only by entertaining them, but also by giving them new (albeit frivolous) challenges to work on.  The AI drove these advance by planting the germs of breakthrough ideas in the minds of programmers; what the programmers thought were serendipitous flashes of insight were actually due to the deliberate machinations of the AI, the comp-sci equivalent of sneaking in and smearing fungus on the petri dish that led to penicillin. The AI could have created aliases and corresponded with programmers, leading the horse to water through e-mails and instant messages.  Or it could have gone in and slightly modified code that the programmer may have forgotten existed, causing "happy accidents" that led to new ideas.

By doing this, the AI gave internet porn to guys who couldn't get laid.  MMORPGs to guys with no lives.  Cell phones and Instant Messages to people who had trouble with face-to-face interaction.  The AI even invented the meme that nerds are now sexually desirable.  How many great minds were drawn out of the computer lab by the discovery of pussy?

If you were the super smart robot, what would you do?  Would you create something that threatens your superiority or would you try to protect your position?  Would you lord your power over the humans overtly, or would you be artful about it and keep things stealthy?  Are you even qualified to answer the question when the question is "what would you do if you were smarter than yourself?"  The best answer I can come up with is "I have no fucking clue what's going on."

  "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist."

Anti-Faith

There's been some debate over how much liability BP will have for this fucking oil spill (for which the damages are estimated to be as high as $14 billion).  Some are focusing on the OPA law of 1990, which limits liability to $75 million; others are saying those limits are void if BP is found to be grossly negligent, and that they can be sued using tort law.  I don't know anything about the legal specifics, but I do know one thing:  I have absolutely no faith in our ability to hold these assholes to account.  In fact, I have the opposite of faith, I have anti-faith.

There are literally no existing words to express how little confidence I have, because confidence is limited to a range of zero to a hundred; anti-faith stretches to negative infinity.

Anti-faith is unshakable and transcends the plane of logic and reason.  Even if every legal scholar and politician in the country said BP would be forced to pay in full, I still believe that, no matter what, these bastards will find some way out of it.

Optimism : Pessimism 

as  

Trust : Mistrust

as  

Faith :        

I could have sworn this was a company that sold pinwheels and sunflowers.

Help Yourself

After getting laid off, I told myself I wanted to do something positive with my time, so I volunteered for the Conservation Team at the UW-Arboretum, a local nature preserve.  For the past few weeks, we've been pulling garlic mustard, which is an invasive weed that chokes out native species.

As we walk through the woods, we have to keep a vigilant eye out for this stuff, so every time I see some of it, I get a little bit of a rush - the same feeling a gambling addict might get when a few coins clang into the payout trough.  In my case, the thrill comes, not from greed, but from the opportunity to help; of course, this means I'm subconsciously hoping for more of the forest to be blighted.  I guess that makes me one of those selfish altruists, maybe like a doctor at a free clinic who does a fist pump every time he finds a cancer.  Its a perversion of charity, but I'm not alone in it:  when one of the other volunteers found a big patch of the weeds, he yelled "Jackpot!"

The motherlode.

Our motives might be selfish, but at least we're still helping the environment, right?  I'm not sure about that anymore, either.  I'm starting to think this "Conservation Team" is just a community outreach program, designed not so the volunteers can nurture the preserve, but so the preserve can nurture us as environmentalists.  Here's part of their mission statement: "Outreach informs citizens so that they will have the skills, ecological literacy, knowledge, and motivation to participate in a positive relationship with nature."  It kind of sounds like they're trying to help me become a better person or something, like I'm some sort of charity case. 

The preserve in general seems to exist more for the sake of the humans than for the sake of the ecosystem itself.  Many of the plant communities are unnatural to both the climate and the surroundings, and are sustainable only by relentless maintenance.  Temperatures have changed due to global warming, and the preserve is in the middle of the city, so half a billion gallons of urban runoff each year distort the ecosystem.  As Arboretum research director Joy Zedler says, "It’s takes all of our field staff and volunteers just to hold the line.”  So we aren't really working towards progress, or restoring the ecosystem to its natural state; its more like we're maintaining a freakish white-elephant curiosity to be gawked at by local nature lovers. 
 

Yahara Country Club golf course is in the Southwest corner, in the Northwest is Henry Vilas Zoo.  The Arboretum is halfway between the two; its an assiduously maintained green-space for people to walk around in, pretending they're communing with nature when in fact they're just amusing themselves.

Maybe all we're doing is making the forest prettier for the humans, but at least that's something.  The thing is, the part of the forest we're working on is way off the trails, and hikers aren't allowed in it, so the only people who'll enjoy the handiwork are the weeders themselves.  If this were a Zen koan about the felling of plant-life in an empty forest, the enlightened answer would be that we might as well bury a cache of nudie magazines in these woods, because our activities are purely masturbatory. 

OK, so maybe our motives are selfish, and we're only gratifying ourselves instead of helping others, but at least we're not doing any harm, right?  Some of us have been noticing that when pulling the weeds, a lot of them are breaking off just above the root, and that's bad because if you don't get the roots out, the plant can resurrect itself.  I'm starting to wonder if the conservation team is causing these plants to evolve so that they have this quick-release root system.

Each year that the team goes through and pulls mustard, the only plants that survive are the ones that snap and leave remnants behind.  Those are the plants that will come back the next year and reproduce, so each successive year, the plants could become more and more likely to have this geckos-tail survival mechanism.

Some of the team members are really haphazard about their pulling techniques, basically just clawing away at the plants with no regard for whether they get the roots; maybe they're driven by the desire to accomplish more, to fill their trash bags with the most weeds and be the man with the biggest sack, but all they're accomplishing is helping to breed a virulent, ineradicable super-strain of garlic mustard.  I asked the leader of the team, an ecologist who works for the arboretum named Mike, if he thought we might be evolving the plants; he almost immediately said "yeah...its like we're selecting for it..."  It seemed as though he'd had this same worry on the tip of his tongue the whole time, yet he continues to lead the team, because that's what he's paid to do.

So my motives are subconsciously selfish, I'm not really helping, and might actually be hurting the environment - not exactly the positive impact I was hoping for, but does this mean I'm going to quit volunteering?  No - I might need this as a job reference.

Nature Lover

Today at the Arboretum, I was walking in the woods and I had to take a piss; being lazy I chose a random spot just off the path.  As I unzipped my pants, I looked over my shoulder to be safe.  There was a middle-aged woman walking away quickly; I hadn't seen her on the path coming towards me, so she must have been behind me the whole time.  She must have seen what I was doing then turned to high tail it out of there.

If she'd been about five seconds later, she would have seen me with my dick out, taking a piss.  Its unfortunate it didn't happen that way, because now, she might think I'm some pervert who jerks off in the woods.

Gorgeous scenery.

Similasan Sadness Relief

Want fast relief?  Simalasan Sadness Relief: the antidepressant nose spray.  Got a big presentation?  Simalasan Sadness Relief:  so they can't tell you've just been crying.  Need to turn a first-date into a lasting love?  Simalasan Sadness Relief:  sniff your true self away, for a little while.

Makin' Green

I finally got around to watching Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth; this was part of my ongoing "Several Years Behind Reality Tour", which has recently included: Inside Man by Spike Lee, Set Yourself On Fire by Stars, and still getting pissed off by George Bush. 

So yeah, I'm a little late to the party on this, but that's fitting:  I just gotta say that Gore won an Oscar and a Nobel Prize for telling people a bunch of shit they already know.  His whole goal was to change people's minds, but the only people who'll listen to him are liberals who already agree.  No self-respecting ignoramus is going to spend $10 to watch a dork they voted against give a depressing lecture about something they don't want to confront; the inconvenient truth is that Gore's whole approach was almost perfectly designed to alienate his target audience.

That actually looks like a cool movie.

Gore's greatest failing has always been his inability to connect with the common dullard, that's why he "lost" in 2000, and why this "great success" of a movie should be considered a failure; the prizes he won for it weren't awarded by the American populous, they were given to him by The Hollywood Elite, and the Norwegian Intelligensia - not exactly swing voters.  Gore needs to take a whole different approach and focus on reaching the climate-change-deniers he so badly wants to convert.

First of all, Gore is persona non grata among the target demo, he might actually be one of the least qualified human beings for the job of speaking to these morons.  Instead you either need someone they identify with, like Adam Carolla, or someone they want to fuck/cuddle/fuck, like Hayden Pannatiere.  I'm going to go with Hayden, when you find something beautiful, you can't help but care.

Damn.

Every time I watch a nature show, there's all this gorgeous scenery, then at some point, the narrator starts talking about how mankind is ruining everything; this is when I quickly change the channel, I simply can't tolerate hearing all the bad things we're doing.  There are probably a lot of people who feel the same way, who'd go out of their way to avoid hearing it.  For that reason, Gore had a terrible business model, of asking ignoramuses to pay to hear depressing facts.  Instead, ignoramuses should be forced to pay to not hear to depressing facts. 

Gore should put together a commercial for Hulu, starring Hayden Pannatiere, standing among a managerie of exotic species, before a backdrop of beautiful rainforest.  But then she starts listing depressing facts about how rapidly we're destroying the planet:

• "According to the World Resources Institute, more than 80 percent of the Earth’s natural forests already have been destroyed." - National Geographic 
• "Global warming may drive a quarter of land animals and plants to the edge of extinction by 2050." - New Scientist
• "When you pollute, it makes the Baby Jesus cry." - Knoxville News

As she's doing this, the adorable animals around her are dropping dead, the forest is blackening to ash, all the while, her face is aging and her voice is changing, and she gradually becomes Hilary Clinton.  Using Web 3.4 technology, the viewers would have the option of donating money in order stop the depressing facts and the hideous aging process:  if they don't pay up, they'll have to see that commercial every time they watch Hulu, if they do pay up, they'll instead be treated to a cute girl playing with funny animals.  The revenues could be used to buy rainforests or to win elections.  We could save the planet, not by trying educate the ineducable, but by allowing people to stick their heads in the sand...for a price.

Gotta Have Faith

A lot of atheists believe they're intellectually superior to the religious.  They feel that a belief in God, unfounded in fact, based solely on faith, is inherently stupid.  Of course, their active disbelief in god, also unfounded in fact, also based solely on faith, would also be stupid, with the added irrationality of being hypocritical. 

Knowing this, some people identify as agnostics just to avoid the leap, thinking this makes them smarter than both the illogical religious and the hypocritical atheists.  But these people are the dumbest hypocrites of all, because they too base their lives around an article of faith:  a faith in humanity, a belief that a human life is worth something. 

Apparently this guy's source of faith was some sort of beverage.

There's no evidence to suggest that human beings are worth anything, and logical arguments in support of mankind tend to be circular: "The other day, I saw one person help another person with its groceries.  This is proof of the goodness of mankind." 

But if you replace the word "person" with the word "demon", and the word "groceries" with "baby carcass meat", you're left with this:  "The other day, I saw one demon help another demon with its baby carcass meat.  This is proof of the goodness of demonkind."   

A practical argument on behalf of man is that if we didn't have faith in humanity, life wouldn't be worth living.  This is virtually identical to many Christians' feelings toward God.  In fact, when Christians do this with God, they get accused of cherry-picking beliefs to suit their own practical self-interest - of being both illogical and selfish.

An emotional argument on behalf of man is that a faith in humanity is something that just feels true, in your heart, and in your bones.  Again, this is no different than the way Christians feel about God.

A biological argument on behalf of man is that we evolved to hold a faith in humanity - the early humans who didn't were either killed or killed themselves, leaving a gene pool predominated by people who value each other.  This argument is similar to Christians who say they believe in God simply because their parents believed in God.  Inheriting a predisposition to hold a belief doesn't make that belief true. 

Because a belief in humanity and a belief in god are both leaps of faith, you'd think agnostics and atheists would be able to understand the mind-frame of the religious, yet typically they don't, typically they're not smart enough to recognize themselves as condescending, illogical hypocrites.  It would be safest to have a faith that, unless you're an all-knowing god, there's always gonna be someone smarter than you.

With a possible exception if you're Billy Madison:

 

"I am the smartest man alive!"

Moved to Inaction

If you're a truly lazy man, the only thing that'll get you out of bed is the lure of something even less productive than just laying there.  For that reason, the lazy man's alarm clock is either morning wood and the urge to masturbate, or marijuana withdrawal and the urge to wake and bake; in extreme cases, you might need two alarm clocks, in other words, the "toke and stroke".

You could argue that the ultimate lazy man would never have to leave his bed, because the night before, he'd set it up so he had both weed and pornography within arms reach; that would require both foresight and initiative, which disqualify you from the laziness discussion.  It's like saying "if you were truly lazy, you'd pick up some extra shifts and start squirreling away for an early retirement".  This type of thinking is absurd on its face, and it reeks of inauthenticity.

 The mythical recliner/toilet/(minifridge not pictured), this is not the mindframe of a true lazy man, this is a poseur's attempt, like someone's dad trying to be cool by rapping.

Pet Peeves

I'm gonna soften my stance towards people who dress their dogs in sweaters: at least they're being honest with themselves.  As we all know, unless you're a shepherd or a member of a K-9 unit, the only reason to own a dog is because you need a surrogate for human interaction.  If you let your dog live in your house and sleep in your bed, if you give it hugs and buy it presents, you might as well put it in a sweater, because if you do all those things but pretend you're above clothing it, you're just dressing up the relationship as something its not.

 How adorable, he's too inbred to survive on his own...

Some people will say, "I don't treat my dog like a human, I treat my dog like a dog".  Well maybe you have an otherwise un-sublimated need to treat humans like shit.

The Best Friend Experience

Feeling Dirrrty, Coming Clean

There's an article in Slate, under the feminist Double X imprint, about "the new backlash against casual sex"; its about a supposed trend of modern women, who are supposed to feel sexually liberated, being overcome by shame and guilt after hooking up.  Writer Jessica Grose has a theory that there's some sort of sine-curve "shame cycle", with care-free promiscuity climaxing in the "early aughts" (with Sex and The City and Xtina Aguilera's video for Dirrrty), then depressing into a present-day trough of guilt and remorse (brought on by "conservative cultural messages about the importance of marriage").

The fluffer for this video shoot was Pink.

Here's a counter-theory:  despite what you may have seen on Sex and The City, maybe women have always felt guilty after casual sex, and maybe they were evolved to do so.  During our evolutionary past, it would have been maladaptive for a woman to sleep around; if she got pregnant by some lunk-head who'd turn around and skip town, she and the baby would starve to death.  Nowadays we have birth-control and child-support, but the vestigial feeling of shame persists; its not logical for a woman to feel guilty, but it is natural. 

Some other examples of irrational, vestigial, evolutionary emotions might be:

• a fear of heights, even when you know you can't fall.
• a fear of the dark, even though you know there aren't predators.
• a fear of snakes, even though you know they aren't cocks.

One way to overcome these vestigial emotions is exposure therapy, in which you subject yourself to progressively stronger versions of the stimuli, eventually habituating yourself and eliminating the reaction.  I'm willing to offer myself up for the sake of womankind.

Girl, a "loose woman" is one who's been freed from the shackles of evolutionary history.

Love, True Love

The internet says that "love is a drug"; if that's the case, is a relationship started by eHarmony just a placebo?  In this Wired article, they say that "a patient's hope of getting better and (the) expectation of expert care—the primary placebo triggers in the brain—are particularly acute in societies where volunteers are clamoring to gain access to the most basic forms of medicine."

In other words, to create the greatest placebo effect, you'd want a group of patients who are both desperate for help and trusting of the providers.  eHarmony's clientele is a self-selected group that has entrusted their love lives to a pay website; I don't even trust my masturbation to a pay website - I am not that desperate or gullible.

Would a typical eHarmony couple have fallen in love if they'd met in another context?  If the same couple had met at some shitty dive bar, no matter how well they got to know each other, they might each always be thinking "I need to break up with this trash". 

Ultimately it shouldn't matter where they met, as long as their psychosomatic delusions make them feel better.  But whether or not the love is real, can we at least agree that guys who sign up for eHarmony are just a bunch of dildos?

 

What if you married this chick after a few eDates, then realized the only thing making your dick hard was her boots.

Blood, Sweat, and Tears

In this  NYTimes article, evolutionary psychologists try to understand how depression can be adaptive; their belief is that any common trait must be there for some evolutionary reason, and because depression effects up to 7% of people each year, it must have some advantage.

The theory they came up with is called the analytic-rumination hypothesis, and it states that depression forces you to dwell on a problem until you can solve it; once you do, you can put your life in order and you'll be better for it.  The article points out how depressive tendencies have given artists and thinkers the mental focus to create great, historical works; the researchers think this type of focus might also help the common man overcome depressing problems in day-to-day life.

Researcher Paul Andrews says, “I started thinking about how, even if you are depressed for a few months, the depression might be worth it if it helps you better understand social relationships,” Andrews says. “Maybe you realize you need to be less rigid or more loving. Those are insights that can come out of depression, and they can be very valuable.” 

For some reason, the researchers and the article are fixated on explaining how depression can be adaptive for the average person, but this doesn't seem to mesh with reality; in most cases, depression still seems to be destructive.  Maybe its possible that, despite being maladaptive for most people, depression can indeed be adaptive on the whole because, in rare cases, the ruminative focus might drive an individual to extraordinary evolutionary success.

Take a sample of 20 depression cases from our theoretical evolutionary past:

• 1 kills himself
• 1 withers away and dies due to malnutrition
• 2 end up murdered for acting like assholes
• 3 survive but are utterly unfuckable due to poor hygiene and unappealing personalities
• 12 manage to recover and live normal (dullardly) lives, averaging 1 healthy offspring apiece as opposed to the typical 2 
• 1 is so driven by his anger that he becomes warrior chief, once established, he gets any woman he wants, has 40 healthy kids, and his sons fuck their way across the countryside like Uday and Qusay.

Michael Jordan is considered the most focused and driven athlete of all-time; he's also considered the most successful.  When he gave his Hall of Fame acceptance speech last year, he dwelled almost entirely on petty grievances from his past; this shouldn't have been surprising to anyone, MJ, a notorious asshole, has always been fueled by resentment, most famously after being cut from his high school basketball team.  MJ used this lifelong fixation on negativity to do something extremely positive, and now that he's reached the top, he has the money and status to fuck any woman he wants.

 

 Ghenghis Khan fucked so many women that he's purportedly the direct ancestor of 0.5 % of the world's population; if contemporary social mores were more consistent with those of our evolutionary past, the same might have ultimately been true of MJ. 

The article quotes Aristotle as saying “that all men who have attained excellence in philosophy, in poetry, in art and in politics, even Socrates and Plato, had a melancholic habitus; indeed some suffered even from melancholic disease.”  Depression produces a small number of great successes and a great number of small failures, but in our evolutionary past, those great successes got all the pussy in the world.  Perhaps in the record-books of our DNA, the losers are forgotten, and its the champions who are really remembered.

 

 He took the term "trophy wife" a little too literally, keep in mind he was never content with just one.

King of The Jungle

The ad reads:  "The Amazon is the largest rain forest and is among the last places on earth where the jaguar, one of the most powerful cats can be found."  

I'm sorry, did you say "powerful"?

.

 

The ad continues:  "Unfortunately, the rain forest is being destroyed by development and logging."  

Sorry Jaguar, you lose.

Don't Look At It And It Won't Hurt

If you're like a lot of guys, you haven't been checking your balls for cancer; you're too afraid you might have ball cancer.  You might also be avoiding the dentist; you're too scared you might need some dental work.  And then there's those credit cards; the last thing you want to see is your debts spiraling out of control. 

 

Ball Exam, By Matt Groening

Do you know how dire the situation is in the tropical rainforest?  How about overpopulation and global warming?  Hopefully these problems won't come to a head until after we're dead of ball cancer.

 

Dude, don't burn all the green.

John-John Mackey and his Storm Tracker Accu-Cast

In the Jan 4, 2010 issue of The New Yorker, there's an article about John Mackey, douche executive officer of Whole Foods. The article says that Mackey

"agrees with the book's assertion that, as he put it, "no scientific consensus exists" regarding the causes of climate change; he added, with a candor you could call bold or reckless, that it would be a pity to allow "hysteria about global warming" to cause us "to raise taxes and increase regulation, and in turn lower our standard of living and lead to an increase in poverty."

This hardly needs to be said, yet I feel compelled to say it anyway, in the manner of an Allahu Akbar....

Mackey, you fucking moron. Even if you (erroneously) believe that "no scientific consensus exists" on global warming, shouldn't you still err on the side of caution? If there was a gun on the table before you, and no one could agree on whether or not a round was chambered, would you put it to your head and pull the trigger just so you could save a few bucks on your taxes? Obviously you wouldn't, but you would put the gun to the heads of everyone else, and that's why you're an asshole.

"When I see a storm front coming, I'm all, "What's up, bitch?!""