December 31, 2008: What I’d like to do during the last few hours of December 31

This is my diary entry of this year’s December 31 (2008). I write my entries in form of letters to a fictional person named Alexander, and each has a title similar to the title of this post. I’ve omitted the greeting and the signature at the end. Here goes:

For some reason I hate partying at the end of the year. I’d much rather I was doing something I don’t usually do. For example, the best thing I can think of which I’d like to do at 11:59 pm today is write “THE END” on some novel, or see a “Build successful” message on a final release of some program. Wouldn’t that be the greatest cause of wishing myself a happy new year?

As it is, everyone just gets drunk on hot wine or beer or normal wine and champagne or whatever they want to get drunk on, then they go and throw fireworks and then they go sobering up for the rest of the first day of the new year. That’s such a boring way to open the door to new beginnings – with a slight daze in your head.

I’d rather open them with a sense of completion and success.

Oh and all those New Year’s wishes people tell each other… it’s a display of vanity greater than when wishes are told to people on their birthdays. “I wish you all the best” is a statement I hear most often. I’m sorry, what was that? Do you also wish me the best possible disease to catch this year? And the best and the most spectacular death? I think you might wanna think about that for a second.

Or, there’s another one of my favorites “I wish you whatever you wish yourself”. Well, in that case my wish has already not been granted – you’re vain despite me wishing otherwise. Right now I’m probably wishing that you be hit by a falling piano, so at least I can laugh about what nonsense you wish about your own dumb self.

Well, these are at least the new year’s wishes other Croats have for their buddies, translated. Feel free to modify them to your language’s equivalents. I’m sure you have them. There are vain people everywhere!

On the other hand, there are people who are very specific about what they wish for other people. They’d say things like “I wish you to find a woman and get married”. I mean, have they no manners? What if I was gay and/or my boyfriend was with me? They also say things about school too, like “I wish you get all A’s this year”. I don’t, really. Never even wanted to. Besides, why would anyone want me to spend hours studying subjects I’m not interested in to get a high grade and thus distort the image saying about me exactly which subjects I’m interested in and which I’m not interested in? Frankly, I’d rather study programming more than I need to get an A, than study Latin to get a B or a C.

Now, if someone told me they wanted my next year to be even more productive than the last, that’s something that would make me stop to honestly thank them. But alas, if I wish that to someone real, they’d probably go away laughing because they really, truly hate what they do. They don’t really deserve such a wish.

What really tops off the whole vanity thing is new year’s resolutions. Basically, they’re wishes to oneself – things to do to improve one’s own life – and there’s nothing wrong with that! But what’s wrong is that people would rather tell others what they want for them, rather than what they want for themselves. Telling others that one wants to improve one’s own life is bad and supposedly selfish and selfish is supposedly evil, but telling others how they should improve their life is somehow nice and selfless and selfless is supposedly good.

I’d rather people told other people about their new year’s resolutions instead of telling them what they want for them.

But that would actually be quite useless if people told their close ones their own decisions when they actually make those decisions (if, of course, that’s in accordance with those decisions). In that case it would be quite valid to wish others success at the end of the year, because one would really know what others want to do with their lives. As it is, people know very little to nothing about others and what they want, hence the vain New Year’s wishes such as “I wish for you whatever you wish”. It’s basically saying “I’ve no idea what you want. I don’t know you at all. But I have to make a wish for you for New Year, so here it is, such as it is.” Of course, it’s all wrapped up in dishonesty and hypocrisy – and no one’s the wiser.

Of course, the whole ordeal of vanity wishes is gone so berserk upon humanity that people just say those wishes casually, without thinking, as if that’s the safest and the nicest thing to say to another person. Sometimes they even end an excellent wish – which shows that they truly know the person they are wishing to – with some vanity wish. It’s horrible! Like a defect that’s become so much a part of our society that it’s considered perfectly normal – and anything that’s different is to be amputated.

What exactly is a girl?

In this post I’m going to be as objective as I can, but I make no guarantee that I’ll also be right. In fact, I submit that I’ll be so hopelessly wrong that it will seem as if I might never be able to climb out of the gutters of my stupidity. But the big problem which will throw my objectivity off the tracks of truth is the appalling, scary attitude that people have towards seduction – not in terms of liking or disliking the concept of seduction, but rather its practical implementation. What I’m going to try to do is to take one such implementation to try and deduce what horrible spawn of irrationality would fall for the slimy methods proposed by that implementation.

The implementation of seduction I’m going to use comes from WikiHow page entitled “How to Seduce a Woman”. Its working definition of seduction is this (reworded) “Seduction is the art of distracting a woman from all of your shortcomings and making her fall in love with you for who you are.”

First off, I can’t bring myself to ignore the horrid contradiction proposed by this definition, so I’ll just get it out of the way now so that I may proceed making other faulty conclusions based on the information presented in further text on that site. First the definition says seduction is the art of distracting a woman from all of your shortcomings. Well, for one thing, there is such a thing as a woman seducing a man rather than vice versa, but let’s just say we men are chauvinist pigs and we deny – despite all the evidence to the contrary – that no woman has ever seduced a man – and all for the sake of making this definition work. Now that’s out of the way, let’s look at the actual contradiction of this definition.

So, a woman must be distracted so as to not notice our shortcomings. This means that a part of the personality of a man who seduces a woman must remain hidden from her. Then, the definition goes on to say that a woman must “fall in love with you for who you are.” Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but who one is includes all his personality traits – the good ones and the bad ones (i.e. his shortcomings). But according to the previous statement, our shortcomings are to be hidden from her – so how on Earth is she supposed to fall in love with a guy for who he is, if she’s left in the dark in regard to his shortcomings?

The definition, in effect, says – never let a girl realize fully who you are, but make her fall in love with you for who you are. But in this post I assume I don’t know anything about girls and I use the information from WikiHow page to discern the mystery of girls (or women, for that matter).

From the very wording of the definition it is possible to discern a great number of traits of this mysterious thing people call “a girl.” For one, a girl never seduces a man – girls don’t practice the art of seduction. Another thing is a bit more subtle and follows from the contradiction in the definition, and it states, in short, that a girl is easily distracted even from the most horrible things about a guy she’s talking to. These two rules will be updated as we go through a list of steps to take in order to seduce a girl.

The first step say “manage your image,” explaining you need to have a good, positive image. This is further elaborated to mean making friends and being charming with everyone you come in contact with. So, if some bloodthirsty maniac wants to spill your guts with a chainsaw, be charming and make him your friends. It says at the end of the description of that step – “no girl can resist a guy whom everyone likes.”

Moreover, if you say something to someone about someone else and it’s a good thing, then when they eventually find out you said that about them it will sound genuine. That’s an easy loophole, innit?

What do these things tell us about girls, however? Well, first off, since no girl can resist a guy whom everyone likes, this clearly fits into the contradictory definition of seduction – all you need to do in this case is to “distract” her from the fact that there are people who hate your guts. Show her your friends, but not your enemies – she’ll be none the wiser. This clearly tells us that a girl blindly believes whatever a guy (who is seducing her) tells her to believe about him. She’ll never find out otherwise.

The second thing this first step tells us is that this is particularly true if this information reaches her from a third person. A girl will hold on to that belief with even greater passion.

The second step says “manage your reputation.” To do that, your human side apparently needs to consist of your readiness to subtly talk of taboo and sexuality. This, however, reveals more about the guys who practice this form of seduction, rather than about girls who get seduced by it. But indirectly, it tells us that girls like simple-minded fellows whose greatest spiritual achievement is to talk about things they were taught are forbidden.

The third step says “do the opposite of what other guys do.” If everyone is giving her attention, don’t give her any and she’ll immediately become interested in you. If she’s getting no attention, give it to her and she’s yours. About a girl, this says that she always likes best what she doesn’t have. Being more abstract here, this means a girl always wants more – a girl is an insatiable creature.

Step number four says “hint that other girls like you.” This is supposed to make her like you even better. This goes well in hand with the trait of a girl that I’ve discovered earlier, that she believes anything her seducer tells her to believe. But this particular step hints another thing about girls – a jealous girl wants what she doesn’t have even more. So not only is a girl insatiable – she becomes even hungrier by just receiving a hint that other women want the same thing she does! It’s nature’s phenomenon, really.

Another thing this step reveals is that “women hold each other’s opinions very highly.” This is amazing because if it’s true and you seduce a girl and her best friend – even by just following the steps I’ve covered so far – you can make them fight over you just by hinting to either (preferably both) of them that her best friend likes you. If on top of that you told someone that one of them is drop-dead gorgeous (or something to the effect) and this reaches them, you’re definitely gonna score!

Now, the rest of the steps are here to simply drive girls insane about you. Rule number five states “wait for the sign that she is interested.” This is obvious, I mean – you wouldn’t want to spoil all that tongue-work you had to do to, right? You want her to make the move – make her feel like she’s seducing you, and not the other way around. Girls can’t master the art of seduction, but they like feeling as if they have everything under control, right? Girls are easily deceived. Goes well with the definition of the seduction that the page offers too.

The sixth step says “speak seductively.” As if she isn’t crazy enough about you already, right? The step elaborates that it’s not seductive to talk about work, school, MySpace, etc. And most importantly, never talk about yourself. After all, you might reveal some things you want to keep hidden, right? All those people who hate you, all your shortcomings… you want to keep her distracted about those things, and not focus the discussion on this. Seductive speech consists of talking about nothing in particular, such as “exotic vacation spots, mythology, sometimes sex, history, astrology, dreams, fate, and anything else pleasurable and intangible.” This helps us refine the second trait of a girl we’ve found out, which was “a girl is easily distracted from even the most horrible things about a guy she’s dating.” Now we can update that and replace the phrase “easily distracted,” which doesn’t mean much. After update, the trait sounds like this “a girl can be distracted from even the most horrible things about a guy she’s dating by idle chatter about nothing in particular.”

The seventh step is optional. If you haven’t scored already, you might want to “show strategic weakness.” If you need to do this it means you really suck at this, but there’s still hope for you. The explanation says to “bend the truth” (that means “lie”) in such a way as to “make you seem honest, romantic, harmless, and more akin to a girl’s idea of ‘the one.’” Obviously, girls don’t care about honesty; all they care about is that your lies are sweet to their ears.

The eighth step reminds you to not forget the golden rule of seduction, which is to keep a girl distracted from your shortcomings. It states “give her plenty of space.”

If you haven’t already, the ninth step says “ask her out.” It basically says that this is your last chance to do this, if you’ve completed all of the steps above. The next time you call her or see her, you absolutely must ask her out! Otherwise she won’t talk to you ever again. You could’ve acted out – and even been for real – the perfect guy, but even if she’s in seventh heaven because of you now, she’ll simply cut you off and will never want to go out with you. What does that say about her, except that she’s quite moody? To me it sounds as if she has a schedule made out for guys, that they must follow – but she never shows it to them. If any guy fails to follow this schedule, she simply crosses his name off the list of guys that are currently seducing her – or, as she would put it, list of guys she is currently seducing. How innocently misguided…

Step number ten says “turn on the charm.” To do that, never tell her directly what you think – just insinuate. It is when you insinuate things that she will truly believe that you really mean what she thinks you’re insinuating. At this point your seduction moves to a completely different level – you no longer need to lie! Now you only need to insinuate a lie and let the girl figure out what it was that you insinuated. She should be so mad for you right now that she’ll actually be analyzing what you say, so if you tell her something directly, she might actually figure out that it’s a lie – so don’t do it! It could be deadly to your seduction. What does that say about a girl? Well, it supports my conclusion about her keeping a seduction schedule – after you’ve asked her out, she moves to the state of being mad about you and trying to find deeper meaning of your shallow insinuations.

The next steps deals with girls who are shy, and says that you should “write well-crafted letters to her.” Well, all this step tells us about girls is that some of them are shy and need special attention. Let this not discourage you from seducing her best girl friend too – she might be an easier catch.

“Obey the correct sequence of physical interactions,” says the next step. Not only do girls keep schedule – this schedule also includes various lists, such as this one, the correct sequence of physical interactions. The explanation says that you absolutely have to wait for her to touch you flirtatiously first. Never touch her if she hasn’t touched you! It’s a big no-no. Only then can you hold hands with her. Only after that you can hug her, and then kiss her, then make out and other things. If any of this is done out of order, all your previous work is undone as she will go back to being totally uninterested about you. Girls are very pedantic when it comes to physical contact. So, head on to WikiHow and memorize the order of those contacts. Hold on to it like it’s the dearest thing you have.

Finally, “establish an emotional connection.” This means, according to the explanation, that from now on you may only “relate to things that she is passionate about or interested in” (emphasis mine). In other words, when you’ve completed all the steps above and are ready to move beyond the petty seduction to something bigger, such as a lasting relationship, you must begin living all the lies that you’ve ever told her. So, it’s not that, as I originally thought, that a girl must at the end fall in love with you as you are, but rather she must fall in love with you as who you told her you are. This miraculous “click” that happens between a man and a woman is actually the point at which the man decides to deny the part of himself which he thinks the girl he is seducing won’t like, and to mold his soul according to her passions and her interests.

So, the end of seduction is complete surrender of man’s soul to the woman he was seducing – and the extent of his surrender is defined by two things: things he said while performing the ritual of seduction, and things that the woman is passionate about or interested in.

So, in the analysis of the article on WikiHow, I’ve deduced the following fifteen things about girls:

1. A girl never seduces a man
2. A girl can be distracted from even the most horrible things about a guy she’s dating by idle chatter about nothing in particular
3. A girl believes whatever her seducer tells her to believe
4. A girl believes anything people tell her about her seducer
5. A girl likes a simple-minded guy whose spiritual boundaries don’t define much space
6. A girl is an insatiable creature
7. A girl gets jealous easily
8. A girl holds opinions of other girls highly
9. A girl is easily deceived
10. A girl doesn’t care about honesty; she wants to be seduced by lies
11. A girl keeps a seduction schedule
12. A girl who is mad about someone analyzes everything they say
13. Some girls are shy
14. A girl is very pedantic in regard to physical contact and demands that various levels of physical contact be done in the exact predetermined order
15. A girl in a relationship with a man owns the man’s soul

I must admit that what I’ve found differs largely from what I thought about girls. I thought love between a man and a woman was the sharing of their highest (spiritual) values amongst each other, coupled with physical attraction, only to discover that girls feel much differently – that it is complete and unconditional surrender of the values of a male to her, and to whatever he thinks she is.

It’s no wonder that I like men more than I do women – if the article on WikiHow holds any water – and in regards to seduction and male-female relationships this is the same as everything I was ever told in my life (with some exceptions) about such relationships – and girls really expect men to behave this way – then all girls are succubi and I don’t want anything to do with them. I’m just hoping that I’m wrong, so, girls, write to me and tell me – do you really expect of men to seduce you in this way?

What I think about diets

Seeing I’ve put on some excess pounds, I’ve taken up the goal of losing some this year. As part of my research into the available diets – all of which claim to work, of course – I couldn’t help but notice that most – if not all – of them claim that we should hold on to these particular diets for life, by just varying the amount of calories we eat and whatnot.

Then on the other hand, I hear the opponents of this one particular diet, or the proponents of another claiming that that one’s no good because it’s high in fat and fat means cholesterol, and cholesterol means a wide variety of diseases, or it’s high in sugars (carbohydrates) which is also bad for a long list of reasons.

What is the single constant I’m running into? All diets have its downsides and therefore they have opponents. There is only one advice which is always given: eat healthy and exercise. The thing that varies is the definition of “healthy.”

So now as I read about calorie restriction and about Raymond Kurzweil’s dieting program (not related), I come across a comment on Amazon on Ray’s book which claims that it is historically inaccurate – in 1900, it says, people didn’t die of cancer and heart disease at such high rates as they do today. Therefore, he concludes, these diseases are caused by processed foods.

Being the intelligent man I am, I don’t believe this without some data. So I figure that it would be prudent to check out the life expectancy at that time, and compare it to today’s life expectancy – after all, it is older people who die most frequently of such diseases, ages 40 and up (of course, it happens earlier too, but not as often).

It appears that in 1900, a life expectancy of a white male infant was 48.23 years. Today, or rather 2004, this has grown to 75.7 years, which is nearly 30 years more (data from here). So, that person’s “argument” is invalid because there weren’t enough people alive back then who were of the age when people actually die of heart diseases or cancer.

Improved technology and quality of life – AND better foods (they wouldn’t process foods unless they were actually better that way) – made it possible for us to live longer. With longer life, new diseases became a problem.

If evolution is to be consulted in matters of life expectancy, then everyone over the age of 30, maybe 35 should be dead already. For the most of our past, we humans have lived in caves or in huts, eating foods filled with dirt and sand. Having a lifestyle primarily of hunters, people were happy if they saw the age of 20. Today, many of us live to see the age of 50, not to mention 60, 70, 80, heck some even live to be 100 years old and more!

It is easily concievable that with this drastically prolonged lifespan, our bodies will go bad more frequently. During such a relatively long lifespan, EVERYTHING is a factor determining how long we are going to live and what we are going to die of, including our diet. If we’ve eaten too many fats, we might get high cholesterol and die of a heart attack. If we’ve smoked, we might die of cancer. If we’ve eaten too many carbs, we might die of some infectious disease that our immune system can otherwise handle.

I say “might” because our genetic makeup is also a factor. Some people’s bodies just handle their bad habits better than other people’s do. Some people eat too much and then they die of lung cancer. Some people smoke too much and then they die in a car crash.

So, no matter what diet you follow, or no matter what diet you try to follow and then fail, you can bet anything that what you ate – whatever you ate – is going to play a role at some point in your life, all other things being equal.

In short, diets can’t increase your life span – how could they? You can’t know how long you’re gonna live anyway. This can only be measured statistically, not individually. Some can only increase the probability that you’ll live longer than the average, but in the end – again, statistically speaking – that very same diet will be the end of you, provided your death isn’t a violent one.

Fatal Errors of today’s prevalent Philosophies 2

Selfishness is immoral and unethical. Today, this is preached virtually everywhere. You hear it at Church, you are taught about it by your parents, you see it in the movies, spoken directly by its heroes or embedded deeply into their lines, you read about it in books, and you are told so by the radio commentators. It is so deeply rooted into our culture that it is not even brought into question – it is automatically assumed that everyone agrees with it. Even the world’s most selfish people – and here I expect to hear a near unanimous approval when I say that it’s the businessmen (except from the businessmen themselves, and I salute the exceptions) – will preach against selfishness out of passionate conviction that selflessness and sacrifice is the way to go. It is, however, imperative to change this deeply rooted conviction by speaking the words that need to be spoken. Selfishness is moral. Selfishness is ethical.

Let’s see what we are taught about selfishness. I was raised as Christian and so I had my share of religious education back when I was a kid. What do preachers who give religious education tell kids? Kid’s stories. One of the stories went thus: A kid buys himself a bag of candies. He is then approached by his friends and is asked to share some of the candies. However, the kid is then called selfish because he decides not to share and keep all the candies for himself. His friends abandon him for his “selfishness” and he is left all alone with his candies. He eats them all and then decides to play with his friends. However, his former friends don’t want him any more, because he would not share the candy with them. And so the kid is all alone. This is a story carefully crafted for the ears of the children. It is an attack at something that’s called “selfishness” in the story. It doesn’t really matter what selfishness really is; what matters is that it has been denounced. But, a clever ruse has been played against the children who listen to the story – much too clever to be noticed by young children, and is rarely, if ever, questioned by adults. From the above story, what do children learn about selfishness? They learn that selfishness means keeping everything for oneself. They learn that it is the opposite of sharing. However, this is incorrect. While the word – selfishness – remained the same, it’s meaning has been twisted. A selfish man is not the man who claims everything as his own and keeps them for himself. A selfish man is the man who claims as his own the things he’s earned and these things he keeps for his own sake. I’m not sure whether you understand the subtle difference between “keeps [...] for himself” and “keeps for his own sake”, so I shall clarify. The former means what you probably already know – to keep for the sole purpose of consuming on one’s own, without sharing with others. But the latter means to keep in order to improve one’s life, by means of any action that was done with the use of the thing that was kept.

There are many ways in which one man can improve his life, and also many ways do make it worse. One may wish to improve his social life. This he could do by meeting new people, doing someone he already knows small favors, taking them out for a drink, merely talking to them in a friendly manner, etc. All of these actions can have profoundly selfish motives, as great pleasure in life can be derived from having close friends. Take the kid from the story – it is the perfect example of this. The kid is left without friends in the end, and has nobody to play with. He is sad because of that, because he is denied the pleasure of playing a game with his friends. To this kid, and undoubtedly to most of the children in the world, a game with their friends is a high value. However, kids aren’t always clear about what they want more, but as adults we can tell that a little candy is by far a lesser value.

What is selfishness in regard to values? Selfishness is a a pursuit of a higher value. Given a choice, a selfish person would choose that which is more valuable to him, and remember, values are that which one acts to gain and/or keep. A higher value is the one which one desires or needs more than some other. A selfish person will, thus, take into account if keeping a value would mean the loss of another value, because this affects his “balance” in the end. If keeping a lesser value (such as candy) means the loss of a greater value (friends), then a selfish person chooses friends, and shares the candy. Therefore, the kid from the story was in fact selfless, because his actions resulted in a loss of value (whereas a selfish one acts so as to gain value). Of course, children cannot understand these kinds of implications, so if a kid from the story was truly selfish, then he woud eventually learn his mistake and apologize to his friends, and perhaps get some candy to share with them next time. That’s in fact, how I would end the story if I was to explain “selfishness” to anyone.

Note that I’m not here inverting our moral code. I’m just being consistent. If selfishness means pursuing a higher value, then a selfish person is the one I described and that’s so by mere implication. But you might say, that we don’t need to change terms now, that we’re used to saying that the person I described here is selfless, and that it’s all just how we decide to call the concept. In fact, that’s not true, because this inversion in terms is today not just a mistake. It is a mistake which is abused by many to scare people into not being consistently selfish, because resurrecting selfishness from the darker pages of our philosophies implies resurrecting pride, individualism, integrity, productivity, etc. as well as redefining courage and other virtues. Certain institutions today are so inherently collectivist that they cannot handle individualism, or even personal freedoms in their true form. For these institutions to work you need to preserve your double standard of living for your sake when you’re left alone, but paying your due to the collective as well. I’m not talking only by Church here; luckily, Church now survives by voluntary donations. This is also about taxes which you pay to the state/country, and that includes people you mainly don’t even know, don’t care about, or even hate. Naturally, with the compromised philosophical background, most people feel like paying their taxes is what makes them citizens of a country. I won’t get into the discussion why that view is incorrect. What I’m appealing to, however, is how far they are willing to go. Today, for an average businessman in Croatia, nearly 80% of the money he’s earned ends up as tax, as paid health care, pensions, etc. Now a new tax has been proposed, and many don’t seem to mind. Slowly the state is taking more and more money from its citizens claiming it’s their duty to give it to them. To bring back selfishness means to undermine that system; it means to say – no, my “duty” is to myself and my own, and therefore, you need to find other ways to finance yourself; it means to at the very least start criticizing the way the governments invest our money, and ultimately to decide to withdraw that money. The governments can’t have that. They’d rather go with the ethics of duty and selflessness.

To be continued…

Fatal Errors of today’s prevalent Philosophies

There are many things people take for granted when it comes to philosophy. Most, and perhaps even many of my readers, would agree that philosophy is not a subject in which things can be taken as absolutes. Indeed, many philosophers attempt to make philosophy seem like an unfathomable subject (whether they do it on purpose and what that purpose is I don’t know). Take Kant for example. He suggested the existence of two worlds: one which we perceive, which seems logical and can be subjected to man’s will to some extent; the other is the real world, the one a man cannot perceive (and then goes on to explain what that world is like… so go figure).

A vast majority of these philosophies agrees on several points which are essentially incorrect. I probably can’t cover them all in one post, but I eventually will, as I will most likely be adding some more on the list. I won’t go in any particular order either and the reason is that each of my rebuttals can be understood without the rest. For this reason, as well as the fact that this is a mere rebuttal, I’m urging my readers to refer to some other literature for a consistent philosophy, mainly the books written by Ayn Rand. As I’m not trying to build a consistent philosophy, but rather dismiss something that is widely accepted, I don’t expect everyone will understand what I mean, so I repeat that for a structured argument for (as opposed to against) the ideas I hold as I’m writing this post, these readers will have to read something else for clarification.

The way I’m going to do this is that, at the beginning of each rebuttal, I will write the sentence in bold, which is widely accepted, and in the following paragraphs I will try to explain why this is wrong, trying at the same time that my rebuttal is as common sense as I can. This may not always be true, which is why I refer my readers to the abovementioned literature. Now follow the rebuttals.

Morality is relative. There are reasons why something like this has even become widely accepted. First of all, it is important to ask “What is morality?” Many people I know mix into the definition the belief in god with no mistake; then there’s some who mention something about being nice to people, about loving thy neighbor, then they say “do unto others as you would have others do unto you”, etc. End result: the definition is everything, except consistent. The essential, discriminating characteristic of morality is missing from their definition. When a person doesn’t know what something is, yet he knows it exists somewhere, he is more likely to accept anything he is told about it. Thus, when one hears that morality is relative, he accepts it and even embraces it because formulated thus, it gives him the impression that he is absolved of the responsibility of ever attempting to find out what it in fact is – it’s relative, so it can’t really be defined, right? Wrong!

Morality is a very down-to-earth thing. It is a kind of your personal realization that you are a rational and volitional living being and that as such, you need to live by certain principles. I’m aware that I’ve mentioned several things which aren’t widely accepted today, such as volition. Many argue it doesn’t exist because it seems to violate laws of nature. At this point it is enough to say that for all our practical purposes, volition is very real. For a full rebuttal of that, read one of my further installments, or some of the suggested literature. Putting this aside for now, if you look at the above definition, you will see that the principles which you need to live by are not defined very clearly. So, one might say that morality is indeed relative, because it depends on what kind of principles you choose. However, principles are fundamental truths about life and its requirements, about man, etc. and not some arbitrary guidelines. In general, one cannot consistently practice an arbitrary guideline for a prolonged period of time; something will eventually come in the way. However, adhering to something fundamental, such as productivity, is always possible.

There are no absolutes.  This is somewhat of a corollary of the above. The quickest way to prove this is wrong is by simply writing it out. The sentence says “There are no absolutes”, yet it is an absolute itself. It is some kind of a paradox when you think about it; let’s assume that everything else is indeed relative, as the sentence suggests. In this case, the sentence is incorrect because in that case there is exactly one absolute, and that is the sentence itself. But if it is true that the sentence is incorrect, then there indeed aren’t any absolutes, so the sentence is true. This is a contradiction, and the sentence is a paradox.

There are absolutes indeed and I’ll give three very simple examples: First of all, reality exists. That is one absolute. Another is that all things that exist have identity; they are something and they behave in a certain way. The last of the three I’ll give is that consciousness is able to perceive things as they are, i.e. figure out their identity. Many corollaries spring out from these basic absolute truths. These are, in fact, axioms of Objectivist metaphysics. Axioms are very small basic truths which can be used to get to other fundamental truths; they cannot be proven, and every attempt to deny them begins by first (unconsciously)accepting them.

Man can’t perceive reality objectively. This is incorrect. This claim comes in two variants, both attempting to destroy the same thing – man’s conviction that what he perceives is a correct representation of the real world. The first variant attempts to invalidate the senses themselves, by claiming that our senses distort reality. It is true that to some extent every lense (such as one in the eye) distorts the light that passes through it, as well as that there is a lot of approximation in turning something like warmth or cold of an object into electrical signals that travel through your nerves. However, the very fact that we are here, alive and well, dismisses this attack on our senses as faulty. You have used your senses many times in your life in order to get through hardships; you use your senses when you drive a car, which could be very dangerous if your eyes were somehow damaged and/or dysfunctional. The fact that you’re still here, despite everything, proves the validity of your senses well enough. If you also think that evolution is really how we came to be, then you might also be interested to know that our senses evolved through millenia, becoming ever finer, and presenting reality to living beings in greater detail by the generation, while the dysfunctional individuals died. We survived, therefore our senses worked.

The other variant attacks perception, claiming that even if our senses are valid, our mind interprets the data our senses send to it faultily, and often dismisses a lot of it. To counter this claim, I provide the above arguments all over again. We are still here. It is only apt to add that our mind – which is in fact us – filters out that which is irrelevant. If it ignored a speeding car that’s moving toward you on a regular basis, you wouldn’t be alive very long; in fact, it is doubtful if mankind would even have cars.

Thus, our senses work, i.e. they make a good representation of reality, and we perceive all that is relevant to us. One of my colleagues mentioned the experiment with cats, where several cats were placed in a room with vertical lines, and some were placed in a room with horizontal lines. After some time, they were each placed in opposite environments, and then cats which had been grown in a room with vertical lines couldn’t correctly interpret objects that were placed horizontally, and vice versa. This was his argument for the claim that our perception is faulty. I responded that these cats were raised in conditions which aren’t normal, and therefore, they could not have developed the necessary abilities to grasp horizontal or vertical objects. The cats have developed only the abilities they needed to survive in their environment. If that environment is not real, i.e. it is a setup, then that is the kind of environment the cat’s brain adapted to and it could correctly interpret everything within that environment. Placing it in a new environment could make some smarter cat realize that the skills it learned earlier aren’t enough, and that if it was to survive in this new environment, it must start giving significance of other kinds of objects too – be they horizontal or vertical. Same is with men – if something new manifested itself in our environment, which could greatly affect our lives, and which we couldn’t see until now or considered it irrelevant, it would be irresponsible of us not to act on it, embrace it, and study it. Consider finding out the benefits of oil; before that realization humans treated it as waste; afterwards we started looking for it.

(To be continued…)

The EU shows its true, evil face

This is it. The masks are off now. But very few remain who dare to see what was hidden behind them.

The European Union had confirmed the fine of 497 million euros to Microsoft for the alleged abuse of its monopoly. Microsoft is now forced to reveal its software secrets to the competition. The lawyers see this as a great victory and others claim that it “creates a level playing field”. Level for whom? For everyone? It doesn’t seem to be level for Microsoft.

But what is Microsoft really being punished for? Did they steal something; or have they defrauded anyone? No, the Commission is clear on this, Microsoft is being punished for asserting itself on the market. Putting it more explicitly, Microsoft is being punished for offering us free Web browsers, free media players, free updates and security fixes, etc. It is not being punished because they are evil, but because their operating systems run 90% of the world’s computers, and because with these operating systems users get truckloads of free stuff, such as what I mentioned above; it is being punished because it saves its users the trouble of downloading all those tools, or having to buy it for additional money; in other words, Microsoft is being punished because it is so good.

Microsoft is, among other things, being forced to distribute its operating system without some of these tools. Now just think about this for a minute. Let’s say you get your new computer delivered at home. So, now you want to watch a video on it. But hey, there’s no Media Player installed. You couldn’t afford it. But there are free players on-line; the Internet is virtually crawling with them. So you try to find it, but hey again – your browser’s not there! Haven’t they used to install those for free? In any case, you don’t have it, so you have to get it from your friend or buy a next issue of some software magazine which you’re probably not interested in reading, just to get your free copy.

So yo do that, and now you’re connected. You type the search terms into whatever search engine you use and it spews out hundreds of thousands results. And you click the link, you download the software, you install it. Suddenly, your computer seems to behave oddly. Curiously enough, the program you downloaded doesn’t seem to play videos, and there’s an odd looking porno ad rotating on it constantly. You think it might be a virus – but you can’t know, because you don’t have any anti-virus protection. At some point, you remember, Windows had a firewall of its own. Now it doesn’t. So you go and download your brand new anti-virus and a firewall. These too can be found free, but you think to yourself that you might just end up with another virus, so you buy yourself something just to make sure. Besides, it’s a known brand, say Norton.

Norton finds your virus, isolates it, but recommends also that you download Microsoft’s security patches. But when you go and do that, you realize you can’t. And then it hits you that Microsoft was once forbidden to further distribute free patches for its operating system, because they make their software more competitive on the market than when it was first launched; thus, Microsoft has to charge their users for these fixes, so as to make people more “motivated” to buy lesser software from other companies.

Well, the story may go on and on. What does this mean for the end user? More and more trouble. The story may be a bit exaggerated – that’s clearly not the situation that will arise directly from this verdict, but it is a precedent that opens the doors to such a future. But what is at the root of such a verdict? They claim it creates “level playing field” and that it “restores conditions for fair competition”. The question is again – for whom? Whoever it is, this decision, being a precedent, will most certainly level the field – into market statism.

Consider this idea of competition as a flat panel. You have certain areas on that panel, each representing a company. The size of an area represents how much of the market each company holds. It seems that the idea of leveling the playing field means that each of these areas is of the same size. Let it be so. Now, consider that one of these companies has hired a genius in its field, who invents a completely new kind of product or service that the company he works for can sell, and which can also have great success on the market. Normally, this genius will want to receive additional payment for such an invention, but in this game called the “level playing field” he simply can’t do that. By laws he must give his secret for free to all the companies on the board – otherwise his own company, or the company he works for, will start taking up more and more space on the panel as more and more users will want this new, brilliant product.

What do the laws of this so-called fair play do to this man? They say “No, you can’t have the fruits of your labor; you must selflessly share with others because the ‘playing field’ must be ‘level’.” In other words, the genius of this man is stifled; he is being told to conform to the majority.

Precedents such as this, as is clear, enslave man and that which is best within him – his rational thought, his creativity, his desire to improve his life and to live it to the best of his ability.

The lawyers are overjoyed by the verdict; they are overjoyed by the fact that they can attack the good of man in this perverted way. This is what I mean when I say that the masks are off. The goal of the looters who brought this about isn’t to help anyone. By the above scenario, which is bound to happen if such terrible trend of punishing the good continues, their goal is to destroy the achievers, in this case Microsoft, and by consequence, whether they are aware of it or not, make the lives more difficult for everyone. They have won the precedent which allows them to regroup, organize and make further, even viler attacks on that which is best in man.

Let’s take another look at what this decision really means. They say that stopping Microsoft from distributing its own free software with its own operating systems will create more choices on the market. What exactly does this mean? It means absolutely nothing. There already is a wide variety of software on the Internet which does exactly the same thing that Microsoft’s products do, so the users have plenty options to begin with. Oh, but, the story continues, it’s not just about having a choice, it’s also about making one. Microsoft is actually being punished for allegedly making that choice for many people by offering them their product for free.

Pardon me if I’m wrong, but are the majority of people mindless drones who make do with whatever is shoved into their lives? That’s what the above suggests – that people are unable to make their own choice about what software they are going to use for whatever purpose; that they are unable to see the drawbacks and the benefits of one piece of software and the other; that they are not able to judge for themselves which of these two programs are better for what they will use the software; and ultimately that they are not able to make choices in order to improve their lives. Instead, it suggests, they take what they get and keep quiet about it, so the courts must step in to speak on their behalf.

It is true – Windows Media Player covers the needs of video and music playing for most people, and it even has some neat other tools. And it is true that people, once they have this particular player, will not seek anything else – because they are satisfied. But is this what Microsoft is being punished – for making its customers satisfied? If that’s it, then we’re back at punishing the good for being the good. Is Microsoft being punished for going to great lengths to satisfy its customers? Then it’s the story of punishing the good for wanting to be better. Or is it being punished for offering a bundle of products, all virtually for free, which seem to be good enough for a vast majority of people? Then the verdict is a punishment of the good for trying to be the best.

Whatever it is, there is no escaping the fact that with this decision, the Commission, and the European Union has shown its true face; the face mingled with the raging hatred of man and the best within him; the face of the looter and that of the destroyer of values. This is a small victory for them, but it is also a foothold. They’ve come this far today; but who knows how far they will dare to go tomorrow.

For all these reasons, I am denouncing this decision and I am calling upon everyone with the slightest light of love for man and life, to do the same. Not because of Microsoft, or because you feel like it, but because you know that the verdict is all wrong – that it is an attack on the best within man; an attack on the achievers, not the looters; and because it is an attack staged by the looters.

Prioritasking

They say it’s stressful to live in today’s world. True, sometimes you feel swamped with work and you can’t cope with it efficiently. It can even get to the point when you start pulling out your own hair, and screaming in frustration. The concept I’ve come up with, which I’ve called prioritasking, may help you get all the threads in your hands, do things one at a time and still not miss deadlines. Image from nobody asked…

One of the most common problems people face when they try to get their affairs in order, to finish up their jobs and get into that blessed state in which they can solve problems as they come rather than have them pile up while they are doing something else, is that they realize that they are swamped with a vast variety of jobs which need to be completed. Some of those jobs have deadlines that are nearing closer by the minute. Others are jobs which demand that they be done right now and any delay may immobilize you completely. Both of these incapacitate your ability to go about doing your tasks systematically and pick them off one by one. The fact that by the day you get more and more tasks which need to be done one way or another makes it practically impossible to think that these tasks should be done one by one. For this reason we often take up what is called multitasking.

We begin doing things all at the same time. Or at least we attempt to do them all at the same time. Maybe we decide to sit down and be systematic about everything, so we come up with a plan. Three hours of task 1, two hours of task 2 … three hours of task n, where n is the number of tasks; follow this plan for m days and all our affairs will be in order. Then we’ll reach that blessed state I talked about earlier.

However, there is a problem. It doesn’t have to be us, we can have all the motivation in the world to go through with the plan. However, x < m days into our ultimate plan something happens, completely unexpected and we have to sort out a new problem. We lose 5 hours solving it. We think constantly about our plan and how we don’t have time for dealing with these unexpected matters and that we, in fact, have more important problems, such as getting to our blessed state. In any case, our plan is ruined. We can’t move everything a day ahead because we planned to finish most of those jobs by the time they need to be done (deadlines, remember?). In other words, our plan crumbles to dust and the rest of the days we spend working only on those jobs which have a deadline. All the other things are on hold.

By the time the deadlines are over, we already have more things with deadlines on our hands. We also have more tasks to do which have no deadlines. We sit, plan, and think nothing – NOTHING will stop us this time. But it does, because unexpected things happen all the time. And so we find ourselves in this circle where we work a lot, but rarely actually get anything done. Moreover, the piles of work we need to finish grow constantly. We eventually find we have no time to do anything other than this multitude of tasks.

We think that somewhere must be that magic plan that will resolve us of this constant cycle and give us more control. We try to think that maybe we need to simply not do some things which we think we need to do, but soon realize that these things are all too valuable to us to just abandon them. However, at this point we shouldn’t be looking at the magical ultimate plan; we should question our premises. What are our premises? That the way we are going about solving our tasks is the correct way. Is it? Is multitasking really possible to man? Can a person really do multiple things at the same time?

To answer this, let me turn to computers, which is where the concept of multitasking comes from. How do computers do it? Computers are excellent at multitasking. The fact that you’re reading this proves it. Just opening your browser involves the creation of a multitude of processes in the computer which the user is not aware of. Also, the CPU will constantly switch from executing one program to another, then back again, then to the third one, etc. (the pattern is generally unpredictable). Each time the computer does this switching, it does something that is called “saving context”. Saving context means placing all the data concerning the execution of the current process into memory. When the CPU decides to resume the execution of a certain process, it simply reads the previously saved context, and it’s all ready to continue with instruction execution. So, when switching processes in a CPU, it means first saving context of the current process, then reading context of the process to which the CPU is switching, and then working on this new process.

Switching processes in a computer literally saves the state of the CPU at that point in the execution of the process. This means writing the contents of several internal registers into memory. Reading context means reading the previously saved data back into registers. When the computer does that, it “knows” (so to speak) which instruction in the process is next in line for execution, and it “remembers” all the information which was vital to that process’ execution.

Now let us try and apply this concept on a human being. At the very thought of context saving we run into a problem. How do you “save” the state of your mind at a certain point of execution of a certain task? Do you take out a paper and pen and write it down? What do you write down? Your mind has no registers whose contents you need to copy. Your mind, in fact, does not work by following instructions. Working is a highly creative process, especially work which isn’t routine, and we constantly make up and refine our solution to a certain problem as we go about solving that problem – even when it’s all thoroughly planned (if the plan of how to solve a problem gives you absolutely no freedom in how to refine a solution it predicts, then the plan itself is already a solution to a problem; this is why instruction-executing entities will always be tools we use to solve our problems, rather than entities which actually solve problems). So, there is no hope of successfully saving the context of your own mind, unless you have an enviable ability to recall exactly what your state of mind was when you stopped solving this problem and switched to a different problem, and do the same for n different problems.

So, now we’ve dispensed with the concept of multitasking. What does that leave us with? Single-tasking! Doing one thing in a given period of time, from start to end. However, a thing that qualifies as a task needs to be somewhat better defined. Whatever you’re doing, you’re always doing some things aside. Brushing your teeth in the morning is one of those things. Going to work is another. Buying your kid a new pair of sneakers because he’s destroyed the old one is the third. Sleeping is one thing you need to do every day (although most people won’t complain about it). These are all some sort of tasks. However, they are all more or less automatic. We can do them while we are intellectually engaged in solving our problems at work, or at home, or wherever it is we have a bunch of work to do. It is exactly these kind of tasks – the non-routine tasks, into which we have to invest extra effort and extra thought, and might I say – extra time – that I’m talking about. These are the things we need to single-task while we perform the routine at the same time. It is our focus and attention which need to remain on one thing, and let the things which we can do without paying much focused attention to be done while we’re consciously elsewhere.

But, there is one big problem with this scheme. It is almost just as bad as multitasking. It could be even worse if unexpected things happen very often to us. What to do when, just as you’re writing a climax of a novel, your wife decides to give birth to a baby? You can’t leave her in labor until you’re done with the novel, can you? This is where I introduce to you the concept I called “prioritasking”. It is quite obvious which words make up this one, but let me mention them just the same. “Prioritasking” comes from the word “priority” and “tasking”; namely it’s single-tasking. It’s a single-tasking method, but improved in such a way that it recognizes your priorities. If you are doing thing A, which has a relatively low priority, and suddenly something happens and you have to do thing B which is of higher priority, then you start doing thing B. However, if you’re assigned to do thing C while doing thing A, and the deadline for thing C is, to make this simple example simple, 10 years from now and it’s about, say, learning how to mow grass more efficiently with this special new tool on the market, then you continue doing thing A regardless, and simply make a mental note on your To-Do list that you need to do thing C at some point in time as well.

Now, the tricky part about this method is assigning priorities to tasks. The example above (with your novel and becoming a father) may be trivial, but there are situations in which certain things seem to have equal priorities and you don’t know which to do first. Choosing priorities, however, is not the topic of this post and you will have to make due with what is already available on the Internet, or what you already know about it. But let’s assume, for the sake of me being able to continue explaining this topic, that you can choose your priorities well. When we suddenly need to perform a higher-priority task in the middle of the task we’re doing now, do we not have the same problem, as we do with multitasking, where we suddenly need to switch from doing thing A to doing thing B?

The short answer is – we are. However, we are happy with that because it pays to do it this way, because if you reevaluate our only alternatives – single-tasking and multitasking, prioritasking is much better. It is better than single-tasking because we are able to react quickly to unexpected things that happen to us in life, and it is better than multitasking, because even though we need to at some point switch from doing one task to doing another, we do not do this switching as often as we do while multitasking. This is a trade-off which we have no choice but to be happy with, unless we like pulling our hair out and scream with stress.

Even if you are a procrastinator, employing this method may lead to improvement. You may be a bit stressed out at first because you don’t think you’ll meet your deadlines. However, if you’ve chosen your priorities well, you should do much better than if you’ve chosen the path of multitasking, because multitasking will often lead – even with best of intentions – to no tasking at all.

Finally, here’s a couple of technical advice about prioritasking. If while you’re doing task A you’re interrupted by a higher priority task B, it would be nice if you simply jotted down task A as being incomplete. Stack your incomplete tasks. Each time you complete a task, simply fetch a task from the top of the stack and continue doing it. However, the problem will arise because some tasks have dynamic priority, i.e. yesterday they weren’t as urgent as they are today. This is why it would be wise to take the whole stack of problems at the start of the day in your hands and reshuffle it in such a way as to keep the task with the current highest priority on top of the stack. Do it every now end then, perhaps when you are taking a break. Just seing the tasks you need to do will make it easier for you to remember where you were when you start doing them again.

I like to come up with the title of each thing I need to do, which is informative to an extent, and when I stack it I write that title on a piece of paper and just put it on a pile which serves as a stack. So, what are you waiting for? Make the list of things you need to do, prioritize them, stack them up and get ready to rumble!

The Perfect Diet

There are several facts about all the diets currently in existence. They can all be summarized in a few words: nobody knows if they work or not. In fact, most don’t; and all the rest are dubious. The best one out there is the weight watchers diet, but in my opinion it is a waste of time. Calculating points? Oh please! Meetings to help you while you’re dieting? There’s nothing a person can say to debunk the number on a weighing scale in good condition; in fact, your weighing scale is all the company you need when losing weight. That and perhaps someone to service it once in a while.

A quick look on this “market of diets” reveals it for what it is – complete chaos. There are diets telling you to starve yourself; then diets that tell you to eat as much as you can (Atkins). Then, there are diets telling you to eat or not to eat a particular product, and the ones telling you the direct opposite. Some require you to count every calory and every vitamin you digest; but on the other hand, that can lead to being too nervous about losing weight – so nervous, in fact, that you start eating out of control to stop the depression; or so nervous that you become anorexic.

Can you believe the nonsense we are being sold? Products that will melt your fat away (yeah right), pills which will allow you to eat vast amounts of food and still stay slim (oh, dear), and various teas and preparations (which I like to call “magic potions” – and I don’t believe in magic) which will supposedly accelerate your metabolism (what hogwash!). I’m sure there are products that don’t even fall into these categories, yet they promise you the impossible.

I can’t then help but wonder how our ancestors – those who didn’t count calories and vitamins – survived? If all those people who are proposing various diets are correct, then I submit that all our ancestors and their closer and farther relatives died of heart attacks, and not a single one lived to see 60 years of age. Heck, by this standard all my grandparents are actually walking corpses.

This, of course, isn’t true.

But, let’s get back to the problem of diets. There is a recent research which says that our organism is genetically adapted to process the kind of foods our ancestors ate. Therefore, eating traditional foods, or foods your ancestors ate, will make you healthy – because your organism can thoroughly and effectively process these kinds of foods. And therefore, again, you should eat such foods – buy locally, ask your grandparents about their favorite and their most common meals, then eat that. Don’t stuff yourself with it though.

There are two more undeniable facts about eating. The first is that no matter how much you eat, your overall weight after a meal will not be larger than your mass before that meal, plus the weight of that meal. This goes for everything you consume – a bar of chocolate, a glass of water or milk, chips, mashed potatoes, chicken, hamburger, beef, etc. Another fact is concerned with calories. No matter what you do – whether you are sitting, sleeping, walking, running, studying, or building a skyscraper – your body spends energy. It spends energy over time, which – in physical terms – means that it has some output power. Depending on what you’re doing, your output power is either greater or smaller. In nutritionist terms, you are burning calories faster or slower. It’s the same thing, really. Whatever you eat, it contains some energy, or calories if you prefer it that way. Burning calories means that you are spending these calories over a period of time. This means that some part of that food you ate will linger in your system until it turns into energy. Understanding digestion, you also know that you will throw some of it away as feces. How long the usable part will stay depends on how fast you burn your calories.

Now, to connect these two important facts, all that needs to be said is that – considering the mass of that part of the food you eat which you throw out in form of feces as negligible – when you burn the amount of calories you’ve taken into your body, you’ve also spent its total mass, i.e. your body should then weigh the same as it did before your meal. However, this is only true if you’ve gotten rid of the feces and the urine generated by the intake of these foods, i.e. you’ve heeded the nature’s call. However, these things are difficult to know, because food in such form can linger in your system for days.

However, tracking down each molecule of food you eat is a waste of your time. It is both impossible and undesirable. Amidst all the diets, then, there is only one way to diet successfully and lose or not lose weight at the same time. Here’s how.

Basically, you don’t need to buy anything special for it. Just eat what you usually eat. If it’s McDonald’s, then eat that. But I would recommend not to eat junk food, because of other problems it may cause to your health in general. If you want to, you can count your calories and vitamins and whatnot. But it won’t really help you lose weight – these things, in my opinion, play only the motivational role in dieting.

Now, even though you may eat whatever you like, the amount you eat is limited. It is not limited strictly, though. At times, you can even overeat, but don’t do it often. Track your weight every morning and optionally in the evening. You will find great oscillations of your weight every day, particularly if you track it in the evening too. Take your morning weight as your referent weight. Create a chart of these oscillations, so you can compare your current weight to that of previous days. You don’t have to do this, though. This is motivational, but also it can give you directions for what and how much you should eat today.

So, let’s say that you’re overweight and now you wish to lose weight. The first thing you need to do is to determine your ideal weight. Calculating this using the formula for the BMI is good enough, although not entirely accurate, because the formula is based on statistics. If you have great muscle mass, but low fat, the formula may say that you’re overweight, even though you’re healthy. A doctor, or perhaps a nutritionist, might tell you your ideal weight. When that’s done, you need to start acting. The only certain way to lose weight is – to be hungry.

That’s right. Be hungry. The first step to successful dieting is to determine exactly when you are going to eat and stick to that religiously. Don’t even try to limit the amount of food you eat in those meals – the only way for this to work is simply by sticking to your schedule. The most important thing is not to allow yourself other meals or even snacks in between. Also, don’t be too generous, and say that you’ll eat ten times a day. Eat breakfast, lunch and dinner. In between meals, you’ll just have to be hungry. This may be a bit hard to overcome, so if you want to, you can consider buying some pills that diminish the feeling of hunger. If you do, try to get rid of them as soon as possible – you’ll just have to learn to be hungry on your own.

Consider also the fact that if you are not terribly overweight, going from step one won’t work for you – in fact, you might even gain weight if you implement step one. So, simply choose a step that most suits you, i.e. which is a logical extension of your current eating habits.

The next step is to implement the hara hachi bu principle. This means to eat until your hunger is sated, and not until your stomack is full. In mathematical terms, your belly should be about 80% full when you should stop eating each meal.

After you’re comfortable with that (and you still haven’t reached your target weight), start controlling the kind of food you take. Cut down on sugar and chocolate. Replace it with fruits and vegetables. Do try harder to stop eating junk food. Replace any high-calory food with low-calory foods. It may seem you’re eating more this way, but in fact you will be taking in less calories, which means that even if you burn the same amount of calories, the subtraction of calories burned from calories taken will be further in the negative – which means more weight loss.

The final step is to eat less. Try to go without chocolate for a week every two or three months. Then every one or two months. Reduce your intake of it in whatever way you can. Don’t get upset if you fail. Just try again. Before I went without chocolate and sugar for a week my first time, I’ve limited my daily chocolate intake drastically. Before I started dieting, I ate vast amounts of chocolate. I’d eat more chocolate in a day than the rest of my family did in a week. Then I limited that to only a bar of chocolate each day. Only after that I decided to have a week without of chocolate.

There are also four general rules you should follow with this diet, and are essential to it. The first rule is the rule of leniency. In any stage of your diet you can allow youself occasional large meal. Don’t be too lenient, though. You may allow yourself a larger meal, or some extra chocolate or sugar around once a week on average. This may seem counterproductive to your goal, but in fact it works to prevent the yo-yo effect, i.e. having all your lost weight return after you’ve stopped dieting. It is also motivational – not because you lose weight, but rather because you aren’t hungry, and you get to enjoy what you eat. Most other diets won’t allow that, except perhaps the Atkins diet, but then again it’s never been proven to work, and it’s dangerous to your health (and, dr. Atkins died weighing over 260 pounds).

The second rule is the rule of planning. After measuring your weight in the morning, you should determine whether you weigh more or less than yesterday morning. While also following the rules of the current stage of your diet, determine whether you need to eat less, about the same, or more than yesterday. Yes, you should even decide sometimes to eat more, because losing weight too fast can lead to serious health issues.

The third rule is the rule of water. You should drink a lot of water, because it is important in processing food in your system. Drinking more water may even be what helps you lose weight faster. Besides, it’s healthy. Don’t overdo it. A simple guideline is to drink half an ounce per pound of your weight when not physically active. So, if you weigh 180 pounds (81 kilograms), you should drink 90 ounces (2.66 liters) of water each day. If physically active, you should drink two thirds of an ounce per pound. This is just a general outline. Note that at first you might have to use the toilet quite often, but that’s natural. If you feel bloated by drinking this much water, then go slow. Drink less at first, until you are accustomed to it, then increase your intake of water, until you reach your goal. It might take several weeks to get accustomed to the increased intake of water. Also, if you decide to measure your weight in the evening too, you will note that with the increased intake of water, you weigh more in the evening. Don’t worry – you will lose more over night.

The fourth and final rule is the rule of exercise. Be active. Losing weight while lying in a couch is pointless, even though it’s possible. Remember that being slim does not automatically mean being healthy. Fat also builds up around your internal organs and there it can be fatal – particularly around your heart. Exercise helps burn this internal fat as well, and effectively. Start exercising immediately. Exercise until you can’t do it any more. Sweat it out a little. Do it at least three times a week. The best sports for this are running, hiking and rowing. And remember that if you don’t exercise, all your dieting is a waste of effort.

So, to revise, here’s a short list of rules:

1. Rule of Leniency – allow yourself a big meal or extra chocolate/dessert once a week.
2. Rule of Planning – determine whether to eat less, equal, or more than the day before.
3. Rule of Water – half an ounce per pound when not active, and two thirds of an ounce per pound when active.
4. Rule of Exercise – run, hike and/or row daily, or at least three times every week.

The same principles apply when you are simply trying to maintain your weight, although to a more comfortable degree. For example, you can allow yourself more leniency, check your weight only once or twice a week and plan accordingly, etc. However, you simply must exercise and drink water. You can, perhaps, exercise less – instead of running intermittently for an hour, you can reduce this to half an hour, or row just once across the lake and back instead of twice. Reduce it so that it fits your schedule, but don’t neglect it.

Notice how your weight oscillates constantly. Sometimes you weigh more, sometimes less. It’s impossible and pointless to keep your weight constant. Your body can handle these oscillations. It may take a very long time to see whether the trend of these oscillations actually falls towards your desired weight. So, don’t worry if your weight today is higher than the weight yesterday. However, if the trend shows growth above your ideal weight, it is time to take some measures. For this reason, don’t be too restrictive on your target weight. Allow yourself about 6 pounds more or less than your ideal weight and only take measures to lose (or gain) weight if you’ve moved outside of those.

Never attempt to force yourself into a diet you are not accustomed to. Not only is it uncomfortable – it is also dangerous. Go into it gradually. You will note that using the steps I’ve written above, you are in fact gradually eating less, and more healthy. It gives your body time to accustom to changes, and if changes aren’t too fast, then they won’t be very uncomfortable either. This is why you should wait until you get accustomed to each step of your diet for your body to adapt to it, before moving on to the next one. As a rule of thumb, such adaptation will take 30 days.

Finally, don’t take everything I say as scientific fact. I’ve built this weight loss scheme for myself, and for me it worked. I’ve never worked with other people on losing weight, so I acknowledge that my system might have errors. However, I firmly believe that I’ve got the principles right – be hungry to lose weight, start dieting gradually instead of suddenly, exercise and track your weight oscillations over a period of time, rather than from day to day.

Oh, and have fun. Don’t get too nervous dieting. Take it nice and slow. Being nervous about it, or setting a deadline is unhealthy.

Guidelines for the “better” world

A video by an unknown author. I suggest you watch it before you read my post.

Amen.

About this video, this is all I have to say. For that is what you say at the end of a prayer, at least where I come from. And that’s what this video is – a prayer.

Nonetheless, I do have certain suggestions I’d like to make in light of this video.

To start, I suggest that all music that encourages rape, drugs, murder, suicide and satanic rituals be banned. In fact, I believe that people who actually make these kinds of songs should be placed under observation by experts, so that we may learn what in the world got them to record such abominations. When this is done, and the reasons are known, we should ban those too.

Next, the amount of violence in movies is growing day by day almost exponentially. Truly, someone should put a stop to it and all the profanity and sex they show. I suggest a law against it.

Also, we are all faced with the growing number of people who make and use photos of nude children. This is a terrible act, especially when performed by the children’s own parents under the excuse of making a family album. Nudity is certainly one of the most horrible things, particularly that of children. Henceforth, I suggest that all so-called nudist beaches and camps (in reality spawning pools of child pornography) be closed for good, and all the family albums of the families who frequented such beaches be confiscated and burned. Such evil should not be allowed to endure. Also, I suggest that the government starts funding a thorough search for the servers which are hosting sites which promote child pornography. Such servers must immediately be shut down and their owners, as well as the site owners, must be placed behind bars.

Pornographic magazines must seize to exist. Condoms and the companies that make them as well. People must be extremely careful about being seen nude. It would be best if they wore swimming trunks while taking a shower. When it comes to bathing suits, they must always consist of one part, and cover the entire torso, genitals, and the upper half of thighs. They must also be either green, purple or blue, which will make certain that they do not resemble skin color. This goes both for males and females.

Furthermore, the media has henceforth the authority to publish anything they want, and people who would rather they don’t show up on public television should be signed up for the government programme which teaches them that they must have no privacy for their own good.

Also, pregnant women must not consider abortions. Abortion is a foul thing, equal to murder, only in this case even worse – it is the killing of the defenseless, of the unborn, of that which could eventually be great.

Speaking of having children, in the interest of decency, a couple should have sex fully clothed, uncovering only the necessary body parts. Also, sex is not to be practiced outside the purpose of the prolongation of the human species. Any other practice should be punishable by law, and these practices include stimulation of the reproductive organs, stimulation of the anus, and the stimulation of any body part on one’s own body or on the body of another which may lead to sexual arousal (such as earlobes, lips, thighs, belly, nipples, feet, etc.). Kissing should, therefore, be forbidden.

Yet another thing concerning children is that they should be disciplined in the most severe way possible, yet humane, for any transgression they make. Children must be conditioned to live in the world we deem perfect for ourselves, and consequently for them. Beating children should be reinstated in public schools (in fact, there should be no other kind of schools but public), and encouraged in homes.

Schools, on the other hand, will again have the task of reading the Bible to children, and should teach children the quotes from this Holy Book, such as “Anyone arrogant enough to reject the verdict of the judge or of the priest who represents the LORD your God must be put to death. (Deuteronomy 17:12 NLT)”, and “A priest’s daughter who loses her honor by committing fornication and thereby dishonors her father also, shall be burned to death. (Leviticus 21:9 NAB)”. Also, children must be taught to pray at schools.

All this is for our own sakes and the sake of our children. We must impress upon our offspring the importance of morality and the worship of God, and if that means with a stick, then so be it. We must do everything to keep them from being exposed to the evils of our present-day culture.

It is true, we do reap what we sow. We have sown terrible evils in our world, our people, and our children; evils such as freedom, as self-esteem, free speech… We must root these out and plant the seeds of submissiveness, obedience, altruism, humility, and of other great values which have been all but lost since the Dark Ages. We must find among ourselves a great and moral leader who will lead us towards such future, and whom we will all obey and worship.

We can no longer presume that a man can enter the Kingdom of God by living without the burden of tyranny.

Not.

What it means to have a pen pal

The only association I have with the term “pen pal” is a very long lasting relationship with a person with whom you’ve never met, whom you only know from the pictures he sent you, his handwriting, and things he’s written you. Both of you are planning to meet each other some day, have a picnic or a barbecue, or just talk, but that day is still oh-so-far-away. Perhaps one day you meet; and perhaps you don’t.

Either way, you respect each other for all the warm letters you’ve written to each-other, for that wonderful feeling you get when the postman delivers that letter, with your name written on it in that handwriting you know so well, and all the time you spent writing a reply of your own. You cherish your pen pal, and when you get a letter, you start feeling through the envelope to see how thick it is, because you want it to be very long and very intriguing, and as you open it you feel excitement because someone cherishes you back so much that they’ve written such a large essay, knowing full well that the only pairs of eyes that would read it would be yours.

And who knows… maybe one day your innocent scribbling turns to something more than being pen pals. Maybe you meet, maybe you become friends; maybe you become lovers. But who is to know? The indeterminacy of your relationship is what makes it so exciting and worthwhile. In fact, the indeterminacy of all things is what makes them exciting. When you set out to read a new book, you have no idea what is going to happen next – that is why you read it all the way to the end. If someone revealed the plot to you before you even began – would you bother reading the book? If you would, do you think you would enjoy it as much as you would had you not known anything about the plot? Certainly not! There’s a reason why revealing plot details is called spoiling it – because it spoils the pleasure of discovering it as you go.

Similarly, you can spoil many things in your life, if you remove the indeterminacy element. Let me make this clear, however. By indeterminacy I do not mean the impossibility of predicting – by any means – the end of things in a given context; I mean by this only the fact that you yourself, as you are, cannot immediately tell what is going to happen next. When you start reading the book, you cannot say what the climax will be; when you start solving a difficult mathematical problem, you cannot say what the result will be; when you start a pen friendship, you cannot tell how it will end. Each of these you will discover as you go.

You could, for example, spoil your pen friendship if you set out looking for a pen pal by announcing that you want it to end in romantic love; or by meeting on a barbecue. In principle, this would be the same as saying that your pen friendship would end in you tearing up one of the letters of your (former) pen pal, and replying with a letter with “GET OUT OF MY LIFE” written in capitals across the whole page (although people are unlikely to say that).

How can you possibly tell either of these things? How can you know that you will fall in love with a person whom you chose as your pen pal, considering you’ve never even met him? Or, how can you know that you will meet at a barbecue – what if you find that you truly hate that person you’ve chosen to correspond with, and don’t want to see him? By the same principle you cannot tell that you will hate him either.

Interestingly enough, I’m not just saying that to waste space and time. People actually do these things! In the last several months, I’ve become a member at some find-a-pen-pal sites, because I really wanted a pen pal to write to. What did I find? Proclamations of love to nobody in particular, promises of interesting discussion to everyone who writes, and adverts saying “I want to talk about that and nothing else, and I want to do it with a pen pal.” Just today I found a site which offered hundreds of categories representing topics I’d like to discuss with my would-be pen pal. Among others, there were categories like “pets”, “hiking”, “cycling”, “comedy”, etc.

Whoever wants a pen pal that would talk only about pets? Goodness, whoever can write a letter about pets to a person he doesn’t even know? Certainly, a discussion can briefly turn to pets in any kind of relationship, but I’m having a hard time imagining a relationship based solely on the discussion of pets. The only counterexample would be if someone is in pet business, and wants to talk business with some other person who is in the same business – but then he doesn’t go about looking for a pen pal, does he?

Naturally, everyone would like to find a pen pal who has similar interests. This reduces the possibility of an unsuccessful relationship, and saves time. Even I want a pen pal who likes to discuss philosophical issues, who likes to think, who loves life, etc. and not someone who isn’t capable of at least capitalizing the first letter of a sentence, if that particular person has shown the ability to form a sentence in the first place (oh yes, there are those who can’t even do that, yet they still seek pen pals). But that doesn’t guarantee 100% that I’ll be interested in having the first chap who comes along writing a letter resembling a treatise on Kant as a pen pal. In fact, if I decided to write back, it would most likely be only to tell him how wrong he is to think he is a thinking individual who loves life while praising Kant.

However, in my view, even searching for pen pals by interest is a blunder. Not such that it might suck the pleasure out of a relationship, but it can get a relationship to a false start more often than usual. Say somebody finds my interests summed up somewhere in a database I don’t know anything about. Now what? Will he write me a letter saying “Hey, I saw you like computer games, perhaps we can talk about that and more?” Is he then really writing to me about computer games because he is interested in many of the things from the list he found, or because he is so into the computer gaming world he doesn’t know about anything else in life? Or is he just writing to me about what I’m interested in because he is so desperate for a relationship of some kind, even if he isn’t interested in the same subject at all (that too happens from time to time)?

I’m not interested in anyone enacting a relationship with me only to force a conversation with me about what I like doing. I’d rather they surprise me by how much they have found out about me when I haven’t said much yet, and see that I am trying to do the same. I’d rather they conversed with me because it gives them pleasure, not because they think it is something we should talk about because we share that particular interest.

Relationships in which both people knew each other’s interests since before the relationship existed is bound to fail, or be torturous. Knowing these things about a person you wish to get to know is like reading a plot summary for a potentially good book, before beginning to read it – it’s a spoiler.

Still it gives people safety to know that only those people will contact them who agree with them on a particular subject. It is, perhaps, a matter of vanity and of not wanting to have their views challenged by others. Whatever it is, it is not as fulfilling as having struggled hard to find just the kind of pen friend they wanted. It is the same as finding a lover by means of a newspaper ad. Can a few printed letters on a paper truly spark love as strong as the one that was fought for? Can you ever truly fall in love with someone who just came to you and said “I really liked that ad in the newspapers. I think I could love you if it’s true”? I don’t think so.

Having a pen pal is similar to having a friend or a lover. They are people whose letters make you feel warm and valued, and people whose insight you value yourself. It is more than a simple question-answer way of communication. When you read his letter, it triggers another thought in you which you wish to communicate to him. And then your letter triggers another thought in him. Or something happened, good or bad, and you wish to share it with someone. It can sometimes be a relationship more intimate than romantic love, because when you are writing a letter you think thoroughly about what you want to write, and only then you write it. When you talk to someone, you might remember you’ve forgotten to mention something which could be important. You can’t put that in a post script, can you?