WARNING: This profile is (will be) full of philosophical, religious and social observations. Mainly because I have time to kill and feel like organizing my thoughts. So ... yeah .....
I am considered and accepted by most people as an eccentric person. Not because of a mental disability but because of the way I view the world and our place in it. I'm mainly on this site because of the anonymity it provides. Gives me a good place to rant and analyze things that I could not put on a social networking site for fear of making myself more of an outcast than I already am. I honestly have no interest in vampires. Yay irony!
I've taken to calling myself a "savage scientist".
1 - Because of how awesome that sounds!
2 - Although I am very analytical, I am also very primitive when it comes to every day life.
Paper plates are a good example. Depending on where you buy them, you spend just as much - most likely a lot less - on 100 paper plates a month as you would on the water used to wash regular plates. And if you can coordinate it so that you restock paper plates when you go shopping for groceries, then the gas used to get to the store for paper plates is factored out of the equation.
My grandfather does not understand this concept at all. He keeps buying me plastic plates saying "you can re-use these" to which I reply "but that defeats the purpose."
I know its common for people - especially on the internet - to complain about how much America sucks and I try to refrain from thinking about it because of how tired its all gotten but it seriously does suck. The US Constitution has very little value or meaning in modern American society. Instead of valuing the ideals of this nation's ancestors, people/organizations try to find workarounds and loopholes so they can do the things this country was intended to prevent.
The Intelligent Design movement for example. ID was originally called Creationism and was flat out banned from being taught in public school science classes because it violated the First Amendment; separation of church and state. So now they changed some words around and made the religious context of it harder to find and are pushing for it again. It still violates the Constitution, they know it, but they don't care.
Freedom of Speech is also under attack with this teacher/facebook nonsense. You can find countless videos and news articles about teachers being fired for inappropriate things they do on their free time. Free time meaning not in the class room! Yes, people should be mindful of what they put on sites like faceook, myspace and "twitter" ... what ever the hell that is, but it should not be regulated. People do inappropriate things on their free time who work important jobs. Take politicians for example. Hell, Obama himself admitted to doing drugs and this is the person we elected to represent our country, but I have yet to see any serious push for impeachment. People have even said "it's freedom of speech, but we still must take action" so they're openly acknowledging they're violating the Constitution but once again, they don't care.
Sure, people say stuff like "i don't want a teacher like that around my kids." but I'm sure at least half the parents are guilty of as much and probably even more inappropriate things in their free time than the teachers are. Also, making sure that teachers are doing their jobs is what teacher evaluations are for! If a teacher is doing their job, following the curriculum - no matter haw poorly structured it is - and behaving properly on company time, then there shouldn't be a problem
But if you are going to hold teachers to a higher standard and destroy their social life - PAY THEM MORE!!! Teachers have to be one of the most underpaid and over regulated people in the country, it makes no sense.
The horrible educational system is another thing. I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist but I swear the government is trying to make us all stupid. I graduated high school with a 3.7 GPA in honors classes and I wasn't even conscious! Hell, for a good part of the last year I was homeless - long story, not getting into it. I am smart of course but that still should not be possible. The school curriculum was so poorly done and so much emphasis was placed on state testing that we literally did not learn anything! I could - and wish I did - have gone straight to college from 8th grade and been perfectly fine. Its pathetic.
Then there's the "2012, end of the world" nonsense. I honestly think that this was a joke in the scientific field that just got way out of hand. I mean, think of how dumb it sounds: the calendar of a long since gone culture ends in the year 2012, therefore we're all gonna die! Our calendar ends every year, so does that mean that future archeologists going to assume the world's gonna end in 2009, because they found an old 2009 calendar? Of course not, for two major reasons.
1 - time paradox!
2 - Ever since Globalization, the world's culture has been standardized to an extent. Just about every country acknowledges there re 365 days in a year and these days are broken up into 12 months. And unless the world undergoes a drastic change in which the continents are isolated for a few centuries, this standardization will go on for as long as we do, be it 100, 200, 500 years from now.
The Mayans deserve some credit though for making a calendar that goes that long. Where we see the calendar as the end of the world, they saw it along the lines of ""we will live forever!" Why else would they make it that long if they didn't intend to at least reach that date. Shows real confidence in the longevity of their culture, to which I salute them.
Politics - yay, fun! To start off I want to say that I fully support Capitalism, and this is coming from a former Communist. While I support and respect Carl Marx's ideas, no one short of a religious deity can operate such an economic system because the rest of us - myself probably included - are susceptible to greed. We all saw how the USSR ended and China is so paranoid about a revolution that they went so far as to hack Gmail. It's true, look it up, it's hilarious and sad at the same time.
Now then, what makes Capitalism such a great economic system? The fact that it's counter intuitive. Where Communism tries to eliminate greed and is in the end ruled by it, Capitalism embraces greed and turns it into something that benefits the entire community. This is because it utilizes business competition to increase the quality of products and lowers the price at the same time. Of course there is no such thing as pure Capitalism, it's simply a benchmark point for comparison. This however isn't what I'm here to talk about, it's simply background information to help those understand the next few paragraphs.
To put it bluntly, the US as a country desperately needs a revolution. Preferably one without bloodshed. Not because of some hippie ideal either, I personally love war. But civil war does nothing good in the long term. Where war without other countries help stimulate the economy (WW2), advance technology (Cold War + Moon Landing) and controls population (WW1), civil war splits and waste resources trying to gain back what was lost during the split. So, while many people might like the idea, a revolution in blood is just as bad as doing nothing at all.
Instead, we as a country simply need to critically review and revise our government system. This does not mean switching to a Socialist economic system, hence my explanation above. I have 2 major points to explain this.
1 - Society's change. Look at the last 50 years in America: TV, Internet, Woman's Rights, rights for minority groups, gays semi tolerated in society, moon landing, cyber warfare, Atomic and Hydrogen Bomb, nuclear power, "hook up" culture(which I hate by the way), men no longer dominant force, religion taken a backseat.
To again put it bluntly, our culture has undergone many significant changes in the last fifty years alone, but our government structure has remained almost entirely stagnant since the country's birth in the late 1700s. We as a nation need to re-balance the balance of power so that it complements our current society. And we need to ideally do this every 50 years or so. Probably even less as society continues to advance. And we can't rely on the elected officials to do it because they're simply not in a position to. It's not really their fault either, they're just trapped in the outdated government system.
I honestly don't have the perfect solution to this but I have an idea for a start: let the government run on capitalism. Yes, capitalism is involved during elections. Each party puts millions of dollars into slander campaigns while saying what we want to hear, but that ends once they're in office. What we need to do is implement a "Pay by deeds" type of policy where the better a government official preforms, the more his bonus will be at the end of his term.
Example: Say we lower the president's salary to $60,000 a year. That's enough to live on but not enough to get complacent. Then at the end of his term we take a final tally on his approval rating. We could include this on the election ballet for the following term so it wouldn't add extra expenses. The higher the approval rating, the larger the bonus. Say Obama get's a 50% approval rating at the end of his term (God I hope not) Give him a $1,000,000 bonus for the good work. If he gets a 5% approval rating, give him a $10,000 bonus. That way the better the president does during his term, the better off he'll be at the end where he's free to spend the rest of his life in a well earned state of luxury. While the president who didn't do shit and made the country worse off. Get's enough for a down payment on an apartment and sent on his way.
The bonuses of course weren't selected for scale, but if we can afford paying athletes millions of dollars a year, we can afford to give a great president a hefty bonus as thanks. This would also seriously encourage the presidents to do well because their life after their term depends on it. This could work for all politicians as well, though with different pay and bonus possibilities depending on position. Like the government, these numbers should also change as the strength of our dollar changes. Otherwise - does anyone remember the Austin Powers movie where Dr. Evil demands $1,000,000 and everyone just laughs at him becuase that's not an insanely big amount of money anymore? That's what will happen if this goes stagnant.
2-There needs to be some kinda work requirement to be allowed to run for president. Obama is a great example for why we need this. For instance, does anyone know what he did before going into politics? No? That's because he didn't have a job. He was a damn community fund raiser! Then he somehow got into politics as a senator which I'm utterly confused as to how he got in, and did absolutely nothing with the position until he was elected president.
This man has no work experience, he doesn't understand what the average citizen goes through, yet he thinks he knows how to fix the economy? I'm not saying we should elect business tycoons like Trump either, that's another horrible mistake, but we should have some type of minimum work experience requirement for presidency.
That's my two cents on the government situation. Any opinions? If anyone has questions, finds holes in my thoughts or would like to comment, send a message. The more these things are thought about and the details ironed out, the more of a chance we have at actually making a difference instead of simply talking about it.
---to be continued---
