Stop All This Partisanship! Or Should We?

In my last post, I reblogged a CNN opinion article “We’re Pointing A Gun At Our Democracy” , which called for Americans to stop all this current partisanship between Republicans and Democrats or else democracy is dead. In today’s post, I want to suggest the opposite: this  political division that America is currently experiencing now is not dangerous, as the article suggests, but rather something that should be encouraged for a healthy democracy.

Recent polls in America have shown that we as a nation are deeply divided than ever before. I sometimes muse that this is perhaps actually America’s Second Civil War, where the war is not physical but rather purely political. This war occurs in almost every aspect of America- economically, such as in taxes; politically, such as in elections; and personally, such as in gay marriage. Republicans are feeling fervent for GOP policies and Democrats are feeling passionate about Democratic policies. As a result of this division or partisanship, they fight each other fervently for their principles. I even confess that I’m caught up in this war.

On the outset, it does look bad. As Lincoln said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” And this can perhaps best describe our current situation in the government. But, if one rids himself of the thought that first comes to mind and thinks about it a little bit more, one might realize that maybe not all of this is so bad; in fact, it is perhaps necessary for a healthy democratic government like America.

CHECKS AND BALANCES

How could a house fighting against itself be good at all? you ask. Well, the first reason might be that the Founding Fathers would have wanted this. As you might’ve learned from your history class, it was they who implemented the concept of checks and balances into the Constitution. And as it conveniently turns out, this bickering between the GOP and Democrats is evident proof of this happening. How?

Refer back to my 1/4/2013 post. “Say the majority has the opinion of pro-abortion, and say that pro-abortion is truly immoral (this is just an example). Well, more than often will there be another group, a minority,  who will have the opinion of being anti-abortion. This minority group restraints the majority group, because through media and persuasion, they are able to spread more of their influence, countering the majority’s influence. But this is not just a two-side issue. There are multiple sides, and thus multiple minority groups, each spreading their influence and thus each countering each other’s influence. In a sense, the minorities do have power over the majority, and if the majority is corrupt, then the minorities will keep it in check.”

The basic concept from here is that it is only through political division that this system of checks and balances can work. No party can become too powerful because it is restrained by other parties. No party can pass its own law because it has to wait for the opinion from the other party. Overall, no party can take total control, and the more partisanship there is, the less power a party has to do whatever it wants.

THE GOVERNMENT IMPROVES

Another reason why we should encourage this division that we have right now is because it helps make the government improve. Although this partisanship has made the government get things done a lot slower, as noted in the CNN opinion article, it has definitely made sure that the government doesn’t do things carelessly and quickly but cautiously and slowly.

Extreme Partisanship There!

Take the 2012 election, which was mostly characterized by mud-slinging between the Dems and GOP. Every time on TV, I would always see negative ads exchanged between Obama and Romney. Oh, boo hoo, one might say, it’s another sign of a deepening division within America. But notice how each negative ad almost always points out a certain negative aspect of the opposing candidate. Think about it: what’s the mostly likely response of the candidate being attacked? First off, he might work to fix that problem. Then the second thing would be to attack back. And now, the candidate being attacked back is also going to do the same thing. He’s going to fix the problem being pointed out and attack back again. Than that candidate that just got attacked again is going to fix his problem and attack back. And so on.

It seems like a dull, repetitive process, but that’s the point. What is the pattern here? As you see, each candidate, after being attacked every time, improves a certain mistake. However, it doesn’t just stop there; the candidate goes on to attack the other candidate, which in turn causes the other candidate to improve and attack back. Here, it’s a process in which both sides improve and gain benefit, and not just one time, but repetitively. It’s the same thing with our government: one “candidate” is the Dem Party and the other is the GOP and right now, they are both mud-slinging each other. And similarly, by mud-slinging each other, each party is continually fixing their mistakes and improving themselves. Thus, in the end, whatever action the government takes is usually not flawed– it has already gone through this system of continual improvement that by the time it is put into action, it is already at its very best. (Please contact me if you think I still need to clarify this part.)

HISTORICAL EXAMPLES

Perhaps the strongest reason is history itself. If I were to tell you to imagine one day in America where the Dems and Republicans agreed on every single thing (in essence acting as one party), you probably would guffaw right in my face. You would say, “Yeah, that would be nice,” but then you would suspect that it would perhaps never happen.

If that’s the case, then you got it all wrong. One- it would not be nice. Two- it already happened. We can take many authoritarian regimes from the past, such as Stalin and his USSR or Hitler and his Nazi Germany. In both cases, both nations only allowed one party, meaning that there was none of the political division that the US is currently having right now. So was this wonderful, as one might expect it to be? No! What happened were many violations of human rights. Freedom of speech and freedom of the press was repressed. People were killed. Stalin and Hitler became infamous. You ask, “How could all of this happen? I thought that the government would be super effective once all partisanship and political division was gone. I thought that democracy would be saved once this division was gone, as said by the CNN opinion article.” The answer to why all this happened lies in that the parties, and specifically the dictators, could do almost anything to want, because there was no opposition party. There was no political division to do checks and balances. In the end, democracy was destroyed rather than saved. So the real fact is, by removing political divisions are we actually pointing a gun to our democracy. I find that very ironic given the title of that CNN opinion article, which stated that political division was pointing the gun. Apparently, the author of the article got that wrong big time.

Protesting Against Arizona’s Immigration Law

In recent history are we also seeing this. Take Arizona, for where in one specific law the Dems let the GOP take control. (In essence, for this law, the GOP was in total control and there was no political division.) What law was it? It was that police could pull over anybody who looked like an illegal immigrant to see if they had legal status. In other words, they could pull over anybody as long as they’re Latino. Obviously, that’s very racist, but the government still refused to change it even when Latinos started pouring out protesting it. More importantly, notice how Latinos had no say in this law. Why? Because the party in control- the GOP- did not represent them. This violates the very principle of democracy. Not only that, the Dems who were supposed to represent the Lations did not argue against this. As you can see, this lack of political division failed to help Latinos become fully represented and thus violated democracy.  So, we need political division in order to be able to represent all kinds of people. And in this case, too, to keep a party in check.

******

All in all, I want to warn you that I am not supporting total political division. No, especially not to that extent of the US Civil War. But neither am I supporting no political division at all, which was what that CNN opinion article did. All I’m supporting is for the government to stay a fine line between these two scenarios. And in that case, it’s happening right now in Washington D.C. So, why not continue this current political partisanship? Cheers for democracy!

We’re Pointing A Gun At Our Democracy

(CNN) – Our democracy is endangered. Not by the Russians, North Korea, the Iran regime, or even terrorists. To quote Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Inside the beltway, the fingers point and the media tuts and struts in glee, and we, the American public, respond by becoming more rigid and divided ourselves. No more “truth springing from argument amongst friends,” as David Hume said. A recent nonpartisan Pew Research Poll finds our knee-jerk partisanship has increased dramatically.

This road we’re on will lead us step-by-step to an extreme: either an autocratic government that functions, or a dysfunctional anarchy. The petty squabbles, bilge in the name of party or principle, will dissolve our self-government.

Abraham Lincoln felt no foreign power could ever defeat the United States. He said, “From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never…No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.”

We’re pointing a pistol at our heads. A government of, by, and for the people requires that people talk to people, that we can agree to disagree but do so in civility. If we let the politicians and those who report dictate our discourse, then our course will be dictated.

Why am I alarmed? Because two “scandals” — the IRS tax-exempt inquiries and the Department of Justice’s tapping of reporters’ phones — have become lynch parties. And the congressional investigation of Benghazi may become a scandal in itself.

The IRS scandal has sparked bipartisan outrage that should require a bipartisan solution. The director who oversaw this was a Bush appointee who was confirmed by a Democratic Congress. Even Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein says he doubts very much that Obama was involved

We, the people, need to stay focused on facts, causes and solutions. Let’s begin with the findings of the Treasury’s inspector general who uncovered it: That it was bureaucratic mismanagement, but that there was no evidence of any political motivation or influence from outside the IRS.

And that, according to acting Commissioner Steven Miller, who just resigned, the problem started because the Supreme Court’s Citizens’ United decision created a surge of requests by political groups for tax-exempt status.

Democrats and Republicans agree there’s a problem. Maybe they should focus on solutions.

Let’s demand an end to partisan sideshows or media witch hunts: It turns out that the leaked White House Benghazi e-mails which allegedly show a coverup of a terrorist attack were themselves altered. Those e-mails are, in a word, bogus

Next up on the playbill: The Department of Justice secretly obtained dozens of reporters’ phone records because of a serious security leak. The double contradictory shell game we’re supposed to believe: Obama is not in charge and he has his finger in every pot.

This bamboozling of the American people obscures the main point: How do we safeguard American lives and respect our freedoms at the same time? Maybe working together — Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals — the Media Shield Law, a solution to the problem, can be passed.

Both the Democrats and Republicans have run roughshod over our separation of powers. Both parties have misused and abused their constitutional powers. Democrats blocked, again and again, President Bush’s nominees for federal judges. Today, Republicans aren’t just blocking Obama’s judicial nominees, they’re blocking the Senate from considering laws and blocking Cabinet appointees necessary for the federal government to run.

Why should we allow any political party or personality to render our government unable to govern?

On 9/11 terrorists attacked the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and tried to attack the U.S. Capitol building in order to destroy our institutions, our economic strength, our military and our democratic Congress where “the people rule.”

But in our partisan self-righteousness, we’re destroying our foundations of government more effectively than al Qaeda ever could. Whether it’s the media or the politicians, the churning of partisan passion into anger, indeed hate, has an ulterior purpose: If Obama’s administration is constantly engaged in fighting for its existence, the governing comes to a halt, and his agenda will go nowhere.

Aiming for that and little if nothing else weakens and harms our democratic institutions, both Congress and the presidency. Remember, Obama was elected by a bigger margin than George W. Bush. He deserves to have his appointees, and he deserves to have votes on the issues, to have the government function, and to fight for the policies on which he was elected. By allowing problems to become scandals and scandals to become demagoguery, we’re shooting ourselves in the foot.

If it keeps up, we will all be complicit in weakening our democracy.

An Avant-Garde Musician

Avant-Garde. Things that are way out into the future, way ahead of their time. People like Picasso, whose invention of Cubism stood out starkly with all the rest of art. Or Marcel Duchamp, whose upside-down toilet shocked and forever changed the meaning of art. James Joyce, with his new style of literature- stream of consciousness.

But when it comes to music, not that many avant-garde musicians come into mind. I mean, you could say the Beatles and Stravinsky were avant-garde, but you have to remember that they didn’t do anything totally out of the ordinary. Their music still stayed within the boundaries of their time, even though it did breach traditional boundaries occasionally. And if you think about it, if we were to play music like theirs today, it wouldn’t be considered out of the ordinary.

Arseny Avraamov

But there is one avant-garde musician whose music, if you were to play it today, would still be considered bizarre. It is music totally out of the world, and definitely something I would have never thought of on my own. This man was Arseny Avraamov.

Avraamov was a Soviet composer. During his time, Stalin had decreed a rule that all art forms had to confine to Socialist Realism. In other words, all art had to be dedicated to the USSR and made the way the USSR wanted them to be made. As a result, many musical pieces produced in Russia were dedicated to events like the October Revolution or the triumphs against the Nazis in World War 2. However, the downside to this was that many talented musicians felt they were being restricted too much, and therefore left the country. It was one of the largest intellectual drains in Russian history.

But to people like Avraamov, this was a wonderful thing. Avraamov hated the traditional type of music, such as that of Beethoven and Mozart, and was glad that the USSR was ridding of them. He wanted to radicalize music and make it everything but traditional. This sense of rebellion was very apparent early on. He was a pioneer on film techniques, and even invented graphic-sonic art. Arseny created an “ultrachromatic” 48-tone microtonal system, something definitely not in traditional music boundaries. He also refused to join the army in World War One and fled Russia for some time.

But perhaps his greatest sign of rebellion and avant-garde-ness was his work “Symphony of Factory Sirens.” The fact that we cannot find a score or a recording of this work today is reflective of the type of work it was—for it would have been impossible to produce either. Yet, below is an audio of what it would have been like- a reconstruction made in 2003:  (and a picture of him conducting the actual thing)

 

You hear this, and you ask so what? Well, if you think about it, where do these sounds come from? They definitely don’t sound like typical musical instruments. It’s because they aren’t. Rather, the music is made up of a huge cast of choirs (joined by spectators), the foghorns of the entire Soviet Caspian flotilla, two batteries of artillery guns, a number of full infantry regiments (including a machine-gun division) hydroplanes, and all the factory sirens of Baku.  A central “steam-whistle machine” pounded out “The Internationale” and “La Marseillaise” as noisy “autotransports” (half-tracks) raced across Baku for a gigantic sound finale in the festival square. Conductors posted on specially built towers signaled various sound units with colored flags and pistol shots.

Basically, Arseny Avraamov had the avant-garde genius idea of conducting a symphony across an entire city for a Russian Festival dedicated to the October Revolution. I mean, wow. This is just such a creative idea. Just the very idea of it surprises and awes me to the very core. Who else besides Avraamov would have thought of that?

As you have seen, Avraamov had decided to expand music onto a larger scale. Instead of the typical orchestra, he decided to make it the whole city, a very radical idea, even to this day. But now I’m thinking: if he made music bigger, can I not make it smaller? Maybe I should have a symphony within a human body, where the heartbeat is like drums, the tiny sounds of cell moving could be the melody, etc. Maybe that’s what I can do. Who knows, it might make me the second Arseny Avraamov.

The Basis of Judgment

Each and every one of us is constantly judging other people. We deem this person to be bad, this other person to be good, etc. But what is the science behind people’s judgment? In other words, is it possible to predict what judgment a person will make?

Let’s look at science  for this. Specifically Einstein and his theory of relativity. In this theory, Einstein stated that depending on the frame in which we are in, space and time is different for each observer. For instance, the fact of whether I am in a plane or just on earth affects the way I measure the speed of a flying bird. Basically, space and time change depending on what frame I’m in. Space and time is relative. Our rulers get shorter and our clocks tick slower as the frame in which we are in moves faster.

The same thing goes with how we judge people. Suppose my class is giving group presentations about Shakespeare. Depending on which “frame” I am in determines how my teacher judges what grade to give me. For instance, if the “frame”I am in is in which every other group besides mine failed horribly, then my average presentation suddenly seems like it deserved an A+. If the “frame” I am in is which all the other presentations aced liked hell, then my average presentation suddenly seems like a F.

As you can see, people judge by taking what other people have done with contrast to yours. Because the reality is, there is no exact thing that’s an A, B, C, D, or F. To put it in better terms, we judge based on examples from our surroundings or from our knowledge. For instance, take Hitler. Perhaps the first word that pops up into your mind is “evil.” Why do we judge him to be evil, however? Is it because of the mass atrocities that he committed? Partly, yes. But mostly it’s because we compare to other political figures in the past who have done better things than him and see that what he did was very much inferior than what the other leaders did. For if other leaders were killing millions of people every day, then we might just see him as any regular leader.

The same goes with anybody who we deem good or bad. Why one is deemed good or bad is not because of his actions, but rather because in contrast to what everybody else does, what he did was better or worse. All of this is relative. Relativity is the basis of how we judge.

So how can one predict how another one will judge? First, we have to consider that person’s background  with inclusion of his knowledge. Again, he is judging relative to what he knows. Second, we have to know if he has seen a similar situation to the situation he is judging now. This narrows done step one, because we can immediately guarantee that he will be judging almost entirely on that experience.

All of this brings up an important note: if the basis of our judgment is relative, then there is no such thing as “good” or “bad.” One can be considered good if you put it in one “frame,” or be considered bad in another scenario. There is also no such thing as pretty or ugly. Or smart or stupid. Because every judgment is relative, there is no exact values or definitions for the words we use to judge. It’s like in my previous example in which I said there is no exact thing for an A, B, or F. We might as well rewrite the definition of pretty as “looking better than others” and the definition of smart as “more creative than others” in order to encompass this relativity.

All in all, perhaps our very human behavior is relative.

“I Would” – Justin Bieber

Just now, I realized two things. The first one is that I haven’t posted up a music post for such a long time. So I decided to post one up today. The second thing I realized is that Justin Bieber is not a bad singer at all.

Of course, that is NOT to say I like him. I still dislike his personality traits, such as partying every time and doing drugs. However, I have just admitted that he does have considerable musical talent. Of course, the question now is: why does his music suck so much then?

Take for example his song “I Would.” First, listen to the original song on Grooveshark or something. (The reason is that I am not going to post his music here- it sucks too much.) Now, after that, check out the music video cover below by Tiffany Alvord and Hollywood Ending:

Which do you think is better? Unless you are Bieber yourself, I would say you would most likely choose the music video cover. Or at least I would. Some of you might choose the cover as the better version simply because Bieber’s not singing it. However, I actually have a legitimate reason why the cover is better.

You see, here’s the situation: Justin Bieber’s musical talent is not being revealed to its fullest potential, mostly because of the way he does his music. And sadly, music video covers are doing this job for him. One instance is the variety. Take Justin’s voice, and here’s another thing I have to admit: I envy him for his voice because he actually sings pretty good. However, once you have to listen to his voice for a full four minutes, it starts becoming a little bit boring, especially when the lyrics start repeating over and over again. Now look at the cover video: is it just one person singing? No, rather it is mainly three people singing it. Thus, there is more variety. There is variety in terms of pitch, in which no matter how girly Justin seems, he can never reach Alvord’s beautiful high voice. There is also a variety in terms of hearing different voices alternating instead of the same voice the whole time.

Another thing besides the variety are the instrument involved. If you hear the original, it’s just mostly drums. Not saying that it sounds bad, but it does sound inferior compared to the guitar-playing in the cover video. The guitar-playing in fact made the whole music sound so much uppity and so much better. Plus the singers’ dance movements.

Justin Bieber

Overall, my basic message is that if Justin had done his music the way the cover videos such as this one are done, he would be so much more musically appreciated. Especially by me. Perhaps one step he can take first is to sing more duos with other singers (and please no more rappers). In fact, he should do that. Enough of the criticizing, by the way. I think I should start praising Hollywood Ending and Tiffany Alvord now. One remarkable task is the way they decided to split who sang what. For instance, Tiffany would sing “I, I, I…” and a boy would sing “know it’s never gonna be that easy.” That’s just a beautiful combo right there. Another wonderful thing is perhaps the music video itself. I loved how they put themselves into iPhones. Seems very homely and familiar. And of course, the guitar playing and the dance movements rocked.

Good job, Hollywood Ending + Tiffany Alvord. (Check out their Youtube channels, too.) And better luck next time Bieber.

Compassion, Intelligence, and Evolution

Reblogged from http://www.davidyerle.com:

Today I want to speak about compassion. By compassion I mean the ability to feel some other being’s pain. I say being, and not human being, because I want to venture a hypothesis that correlates compassion and intelligence. To do that, I have to look at compassion in animals.

There are different degrees of compassion. Most human beings feel compassion towards their children. A smaller subset feels compassion towards their parents. In decreasing order of frequency, human beings feel compassion towards their family, friends, reduced social group, extended social group, nation, continent and humanity as a whole.

Compassion is a fairly recent invention. For example, bacteria don’t feel compassion. They don’t feel much, in fact. Worms, fish and cephalopods also don’t seem to have much compassion either, not even towards their children. Reptiles in general don’t take care of their young: they lay their eggs and leave their offspring to fend for themselves. One may say they couldn’t care less.

Only mammals and birds seem to feel some sort of compassion, though it is mostly confined to the family unit. Mammals and birds also have the biggest brain sizes in the animal kingdom. It is probably not a coincidence: feeling compassion requires the capacity to make simulations of another living thing. But let me elaborate, because I believe the simulation point to be important.

Most living beings are capable of making some type of simulation of their environment. That’s how we make decisions: we simulate possible outcomes based on our different courses of action and we choose the one that leads to the most pleasure and the least pain. At least, that’s the basic framework. Bacteria don’t have to simulate much: when their food detectors fire, they move towards the food. That’s pretty much it. But, as the complexity in situations increases, so does the need for more accurate simulations.

Any software engineer will tell you that simulating something inorganic is millions of times easier than simulating something organic. A rock’s trajectory is easy to calculate; a sparrow’s, not so much. The capability for simulating other living things, then, requires significant processing power. Since this capability is needed for compassion, it is not surprising that only animals with highly developed brains have developed it. In fact, one may even see compassion as a by-product: as animals learned to simulate others (in order to eat them, for example) they also learned to simulate their peers, which lead to some kind of understanding that these peers also feel pain. Mirror neurons may also have evolved in this context.

A sociable animal

Monkeys are capable of compassion. Unlike other mammals, theirs extends a little further from their family and into their social group. If a chimpanzee is beat up in a fight, it is common to see another one trying to comfort it by putting its arm around it, something which may look spookily familiar. However, chimpanzees are only capable of compassion within their social group. They couldn’t care less about what happens to individuals outside it.

This is the way it works in humans, most of the time. Every time there’s a plane accident, the first we ask is “were there any people from my country?” We don’t care what happened to all of those foreigners. We want to know that our people are safe. The same thing happened recently with the Boston bombings: even though much more horrid acts take place daily in Iraq or Syria, we shrug them off without much thought, while being struck with grief with the ones that hit close to home.

However, that’s only part of the story. Some humans do feel empathy towards other people that are not in their social group. According to primatologist Frans de Waal, this kind of compassion is “a fragile experiment” being conducted by our species. That is, we are the first species to feel universal empathy. And I think this is significant, because it signals a trend from less compassion to more: from not caring about any other individual to caring about your children to caring about your family, to your social group, to every single member of your species.

Can this trend continue? As we get smarter, be it with technology or evolution, will we become even more compassionate? Is caring for the welfare of animals the next step, which is already taking place? As we get smarter, will we be able to simulate other living beings better? Will that increase our compassion? Where does this lead?

People usually see evolution (rightly) as this really cruel, blind process where the strong step on the weak. However, I find it encouraging that, even so, it seems to have led to the emergence of increasingly compassionate species. This outcome was far from obvious, given the way natural selection works. I like the idea of evolution being a blind, cruel, horrid process that somehow gives birth to a species that stops being blind and cruel. Evolution as a process that can put a stop to itself and become something better, gentler, more nurturing, more creative.

Who knows, maybe there’s still hope for us all.

Getting More And More Spoiled

In my last last post about a former North Korean prisoner, I talked about how it was maybe not that bad if everybody were to experience what he went through. Today, I will go deeper.

There’s a very big irony that I find in dreams, such as the American dream. In the stereotypical American Dream, a poor person hopes to settle in America, find a job, bring his poor family over, and establish great prosperity for later generations. However, it takes years of hard work, pain, prejudice, and suffering for this poor person to achieve his goal. He hopes that in the end, it will pay off not for himself, but for future descendants.

Yet, the irony is here: usually it will not pay off. In fact, although it will make his descendants physically and emotionally more well off, it will morally deteriorate the future generations. Why? Because as these descendants are living the high life and enjoying the success of their forebears, they do not understand the hard work that got them this high life. Rather, they take it for granted, and thus become more taking and more unappreciative and more wasteful and more spoiled.

Perhaps we can put this in a larger scale, say the country of the USA. Before America was ever established, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and all those rights were unheard of. To many people around the world, that was like being able to go to heaven guaranteed. When America was founded and the Constitution created, for the first time such things existed. The first American colonists didn’t take this for granted. They cheered for it, and they were content with it.

Another Example of  Past American Spoiledness

Yet, we then began to see a shift in attitude as those former colonists died off and their descendants lived on. First, we begin to see discontent with the government. People begin demanding for more rights, more change, when they should already be happy with what millions of people didn’t (and still don’t) have. We also see these descendants becoming more spoiled and more morally corrupt. For instance, when the first immigrants came through Ellis Island, these American descendants started prejudicing against them, thinking they were taking away jobs. What happened to them remembering about free rights for everybody? About how their forebears were just like those immigrants seeking for a new life in America?

Obviously, the problem shows: these descendants took these rights for granted, and thus became more un-content and more morally degraded. The former colonists didn’t, because they had been through the suffering and realized how lucky they were to even receive these constitutional rights. The posterity didn’t go through the suffering and thus were unhappy on not receiving more.

One can apply this to my generation- teenagers today, in America. I do admit that we are taking things for granted every time. That we are lazy, corrupt, and don’t realize suffering around the world unless it’s in our faces. For example, I don’t like eating most vegetables. That just shows that I’m taking my privilege to eat any kind of food I want for granted, because many children out there in the world don’t have my luxury and in fact don’t have any food at all. However, I am so spoiled to the extent that I don’t see this food pickiness as a luxury. Obviously, I have just shown my spoiledness. And why is this? Because I haven’t been through the suffering that my mother, grandmother, and ancestors went to allow me to have this kind of luxury. (In fact, my mother was homeless before for most of her childhood.)

Simply the solution is that everybody should have to suffer at least once in their life. Not the easy kind of suffering, such as mourning for a dead relative, but rather, the suffering of a starving kid in Africa, the suffering of living in nature by yourself, the suffering of that former North Korean prisoner. If everybody were to go through this and follow it, we all would be more appreciative of everything around us.

When was the last time while you ate your wonderful food that you ever thought about them? I bet you never did; therefore I have proven your indifference to suffering unless it’s in front of your face and your spoiledness.

Unfortunately, we are also spoiled to the extent that we are not willing to take up this challenge. Therefore, my forecast: the human generation will become more spoiled and spoiled as life for everybody gets better and better (due to technology and science) and thus everybody gets more greedy and greedy and thus we will use up all the resources of the Earth without taking any thought of conserving it and of the hard work of previous generations. (And please, don’t give me that eco-friendly sh-t, because we will still be using up resources, either way.) Once all the resources are gone, then the human race would have realized that they took things for granted too much. But it’s too late, and so end of the world.

The Funniest Proof I’ve Seen

Although last time I said that I would delve deeper into thoughts about my last post, I can’t help but postpone it for my post after this one to make way for this. It’s a proof that my engineering teacher shared with my class.

Thesis:
Engineers and scientists will never make as much money as business executives. Now a rigorous mathematical proof that explains why this is true.

Postulate 1:
Knowledge is Power. (can’t argue against that)

Postulate 2:
Time is Money. (very true in life)

Proof:
As every engineer knows,

    Work
   ——— = Power
     Time

since Knowledge = Power, and Time = Money, we have 

Work
   ——— = Knowledge
     Money

solving for Money, we get

     Work
   ——— = Money
   Knowledge

Thus, as Knowledge approaches zero, Money approaches infinity regardless of the Work done.

Conclusion:                                                                                                                                         The less you know, the more money you make. ( Therefore implying that businessmen are more stupid than engineers, and thus they make much more money than engineers.)

Perhaps it’s not as funny as it seems, but when my engineering teacher was reading it out loud while showing us, I was laughing like crazy. I especially like the pun on the word “power”, where power can mean the power the US president holds or power in scientific terms. Either way, this is a one-of-a-kind proof. It’s like a math and science joke, except this time there is actual science and math. Most math and science jokes are like “What do you get if you add two apples with three apples? A high school math problem!” There’s no actual math and science involved. In this case, however, there is. The substitution and the workings of the equations are all math, and the power=work/time equation is science.

If you get across any jokes like these, please send them to me! Thanks.

From A North Korean Prison Camp

Imagine being born where you experience no family, no love, no nothing. All you do everyday is work constantly, being slaves. You are constantly starving, and food is the only thing that you care about. You cannot escape, but you feel no need to escape for you feel that the whole world is like this- cruel, mean, and heartless. You don’t know that the Earth is round. You don’t know where China is. You don’t even know that China exists.

To me, this sounds like a dystopian society- the sort that you see in science fiction books. People are working constantly like robots and treated like animals. Although this may sound like science fiction, such things do exist today, in North Korea. Below is a story of a former North Korean prisoner who was born into a North Korean camp and grew up not knowing the outside world. He was perhaps the only one to escape the prison camp and make it alive to tell the story.

It seems kind of weird, doesn’t it? I mean, it seems kind of hard to imagine that such things do exist today in a modern world. But it does make me appreciate the fact that I live in America, a place definitely not North Korea.

A few things that caught my interest. First, Shin himself told that he did not feel any love or emotion when his mother and brother were executed. He only started to feel guilty after seeing other people with loving families. So brings up the question: most people say that children are naturally good and learn hate. However, in this case, it seems as if Shin had to learn love himself. Does this mean that children not only learn hate, but must also learn love, too?

Another thing: is this experience that Shin went through necessarily bad? On the outset it sure does look bad. I mean, who would want to go through what Shin went through? But, if all the spoiled children in the world were to go through his experience, they would definitely be a lot less spoiled. In fact, not just to children but also to grown-ups, for they also waste things and take things for granted, too.

In my next post, I would like to perhaps delve deeper into some of the things that I have pondered about for this story.

Lies, Lies, Lies

To my readers, sorry for not having blogged for around six days. Currently, I’m getting bagged by my schoolwork and am finding not enough time. But at least I should be able to blog regularly starting from today.

In my last post, I wrote an epic simile comparing lying to an inexperienced swimmer jumping off an helicopter. Today, I would like to focus on the nature of lies and why we lie. The first part of my philosophy on lies- we lie because we want things our way. This can be seen in many examples throughout history and literature.

Part of this wanting things our way can be invoked by fear. In fact, fear is a common cause of many lies. For instance, let us take the typical lie- a little boy goes to his father. The father asks him, what did you score on the math test you took today? And the boy answers, Why, I scored 100%, when in actuality he only scored a 50/100. (And yes, that little boy was me.) Here, the cause of this lie was the boy being scared of his father being mad at him for a bad score. If he had told the truth, then what should have happened was a torturous punishment from his father. Since this little boy wanted things his way, or in other words, he wanted to be free of any punishment, he lied.

Not all lies are governed by fears. Take for instance of the boy who cried wolf. So here was a boy whose job was to watch over the sheep. If ever a wolf was to appear, he would have to cry, “Wolf!” and the villagers would come up to the shepherding hill to fight off the wolf. So, as the boy was watching over the sheep, he thought that is was pretty lonely. So he cried “Wolf” falsely, and the villagers came up, all worried and intent on attack wolves. When they discovered that it was all a prank, they all went back to business as usual. The boy repeated this incident one more time, and again the villagers got fooled one more time. The third time, however, when a wolf actually came, the villagers didn’t come, thinking it was just a joke again, and so all the boy could do was watch the sheep being eaten up. What the boy was doing was essentially lieing to the villagers that there were wolves. He lied because of a need to feel un-lonely, and was willing to do it at expense of the villagers’ energy. In other words, greediness was the motivator of this lie. He wanted things his way (being unlonely), and therefore lied for it.

Lies.. ready to explode..

So we see fear and greediness as the two main motivators of lies. Now the second part of my philosophy-  all lies are like bombs- some tick faster and some tick slower.  Lies build up upon each other, and in the end, they explode. For instance, go back to the kid who lied to his father about his test score. Suppose the father is going through his son’s backpack and comes upon a crumpled 50/100 test. When asked about it, the kid lies that it was from a previous test a long time ago in which he already told the father about it. The father looks at the test and discovers that it is a test on linear equations, and knowing that his son is currently learning it, asks the child how he can be tested on it such a long time ago if he is just currently learning it. The child then lies again to his math-lousy father that it is a different kind of linear equation math. The father then goes to a math classmate of his child and discovers it is not so. The child then lies again that that classmate hates him and wants him to be punished. As you can see, there is a pattern ongoing. Each time, the child has to keep on lying to cover up another lie that is covering up another lie that is covering up another lie and so on. And all of these lies all resulted from only one single lie. All these lies are stacking up, and no doubt it will collapse sooner or later.

Notice another thing, too- this example of the lying child can take over the time span of only one day or for a whole year. So even if you think you got away with a lie, very possibly that lie will haunt you back so, after some period of time. I believe that nobody cannot get caught lying, and even right now if you think that you got away with a certain minor lie, it will come back to haunt you, perhaps the next day, the next year, the next decade, or even at the time of your death. You never know.

My last part of my philosophy on lies- people lie all the time. In fact, you lie all the time. I lie all the time. There is not a single person who does not lie at all for one day. Even a guy who is trapped in a room all by himself is lying. Even a mute person is lying. Because they are all lying to themselves. How do we lie to ourselves? Why, by simply dreaming. Sometimes, I dream that I’m in the NBA being the next Jeremy Lin. I in a sense create an illusion to myself that says to me, “Man, Titus, you are so pro.” However, once I wake up to reality, all of that is gone. In other words, by dreaming, one lies to his brain that he is this and he is that, but once reality hits us, that lie is broken and we face the cruel hard truth. So a mute guy might be lying to himself that he can talk. A guy trapped all alone might be lying to himself that he has a friend right next to him. My basic point- dreaming is lying.

Of course, dreaming is not always bad. This translates into the fact that lying is not always bad. In fact, lying is most of the time good. We lie to ourselves most of the time to temporarily relieve ourselves from the cold, hard truth. To temporarily have things the way we want it to be (referring back to my first point). As one can see, sometimes even the truth is bad, since it causes us to be downtrodden.

Most lies aren’t bad, contrary to societal values. So what makes certain lies bad and certain lies good? Let’s put that for a later time.