resistance

Forget about Venice, go to Amsterdam!

Amsterdam channels (my photo)

I spent some time this summer in The Netherlands, mostly in Den Haag and Amsterdam. I was impressed.

One thing I noticed - if you don’t drink beer while in Amsterdam the weather gets bad. If you drink beer and weather is still bad, drink some more. It gets better…

If you ever wondered why the sky looks so… unreal in Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings, wonder no more. The sky in Amsterdam really looks impossible. I managed to take some pictures on my way out of the Van Gogh museum and just looking at it makes you feel like you are on a different planet. Imp-osible, surreal sky.

Amsterdam - surreal sky (my photo)

Funny story, we bought some of the lollipops they sell in the floating market, made from Mary Jane or Hashish and to tell you the truth they barely give an effect on you, but if you have 4 or 5 you kind of get in the mood. So we got some of these and I put some of them in a bag completely forgetting about them up until I was about to enter another country where MJ is not legal. I had “oh shit” moment.

It made me realize that people should be free to do whatever they want with their own bodies. If you want to take drugs, by all means, do it. It is none of the government business. The so called war on drugs is causing more harm than good. Drugs should be legalized, period. It is not healthy, but so is the tobacco, alcohol and fire arms and you can buy them everywhere, right?

Amsterdam, Mary Jane growing starters kit (my photo)

If you are stupid enough to smoke or drug yourself to death, by all means life is a game of survival. If you are not intelligent enough to realize that drugs will fuck you up real good and you will probably lose your job, lifestyle and family, not my problem, it is yours.

The red light district was a bit of a disappointment though. It kinda looks like a place with dirty business and fast money. There was a girl with me and she was eager to take a look at the district, but she was very disappointed too. It was 1AM and she was the ONLY girl on the street not behind a window, if you know what I mean. You are not allowed to take pictures, that is of course unless you use some services.

This legalized prostitution thing is definitely better for the girls as they are protected by the law and all, but still the district appears to be controlled by gangs.

Amsterdam after 10PM (my photo)

Yep, legal or not the oldest profession is not going anywhere so we may as well embrace it.

Overall Amsterdam is beautiful city, with a lot of cool stuff to do. Van Gogh museum is a must see. It is an experience. Make sure you go around 8PM so you can enjoy the night sky when you are out. You will be out right on time for when Amsterdam comes alive - 10PM. Everybody is on the streets, all bars are full with people, fun times.

As my uncle likes to say - everything cool happens after 10PM :)

I went to the Sea Shepherd - Pirates & Mermaids Masquerade party in Toronto couple of weeks ago. It was really nice party and I met a lot of really noble pirates and some irresistible mermaids…

Paul Watson

Paul Watson (one of the founders of Green Peace and founder of Sea Shepherd)  was there. He talked at the end of the party for about an hour. His speech really impressed me! I can tell he was talking from his heart as he never  looked into notes and never stopped trying to find words to continue. He was in that speech emotionally and spiritually, a man who believes in what he does. I was surprised to see that he was very friendly and talked with anyone, happily agreed to pose for pictures and talk.

It is such an rare occasion to see somebody doing something not motivated by money these days. Trying to save dolphins, sharks, seals just because you think it is the right thing to do is as noble as it gets.

It made me think - These people are the heroes of our time! Hell, they are heroes of all times!

When 100 years later people realize that the last fish is caught in the nets, the last river is poisoned, the last wild animal is killed to be made into a fancy restaurant soup, when the last tree is cut, people will realize that they can not breathe or eat money! Oh, what a surprise that will be.

Paul Watson

Apparently, most of the governments seem to think that to make money is more important. What do you think?

An Indian tribe in northern Canada (Mohawks I think it was) has send a special flag to Sea Shepherd so that their ships can sail under their flag. This is an extremely rare honor, once in a life time type of thing.

If you want to know more about Sea Shepherd (and you should) please check their web site: www.seashepherd.com. They are the only organization  dare to stand between the killers and the dolphins, whales, baby seals. There are very nice TV series on Animal Planet called “Whale Wars”, they are excellent, watch them.

Support Sea Shepherd, it is your ocean and your planet that is being destroyed. When the planet is dead, nobody will need your help!

I was reading an article recently, regarding human physiology. It mentioned that the reason men have breast is that during our development as embryo we all start as women. Part of all embryos ~49% or so during the development are becoming men.

When you think about, it makes sense - girls’ breasts are developed later in the puberty, before that boys and girls are pretty much the same (almost anyway). The important part is that men (boys) have breasts too, although they don’t really need them. They are just a leftover from the embryonic development. Women‘ embryonic development, to be exact.

If we look at the genetics the sex is described by the chromosomes - X and Y. Women have XX (two X) chromosomes while men have XY (one X and one Y) chromosome. Fair enough, there are suppose to be differences, but how many genes are in each of these chromosomes?

Number of genes X vs Y:

X chromosome: 1,846
Y chromosome: 454

Do you get the picture? If women have XX and men XY then the total number of genes for each gender are:

Women: 3692
Men: 2300

So to ‘describe’ a man you need 38% LESS genes! Add to that our inability (I am a man) to understand ‘what women want’ and you will see the picture even more clearly.

Let’s look at the sexuality:

If you were to describe the sexuality of a man, I think an ON/OFF switch is pretty close to the reality. Men don’t need much to get ‘ready’ - show them some tits or legs, or neck (put your favorite body part here) and we are ON. 50 seconds after we deposit our sperm the switch is OFF.

Women’ sexuality however is like the cockpit of a space shuttle. There are hundreds of knobs, switches, indicators, detectors and stuff we don’t even know what it does. It takes time to start the engine, but once it is hot and running, oh boy, the sky is the limit. It takes much longer for women to ‘cool down’. You have to ‘land’ that shuttle properly or you will crash and burn. Women are with much much more sophisticated sexuality than men.

The more I think about all this the more I see it. Men are the retarded brother of the geniuses women.

We (men) are not the primary human sex, we are the appendix of the humans species. We are the ’slaves’ the women need so that they can survive.

Historically and socially men were responsible for running around hunting, fighting wars and all that nonsense and this made us somewhat physically stronger so we kind of took the power in our hands. But don’t be fooled we (men) are still the appendix. The important part of the humanity are the women. We are the ‘helpers’.

So all that stuff in the Bible that god created Adam (the man) and then using his rib or whatever he created Eve (the woman) is a nonsense. If there was ever Adam and Eve, Eve was created first. Adam was created later to make things easier for Eve.

We live in man’s world. And just look at it - it is a disaster. Stupid wars, almost dead environment, idiot president of the largest economy in the world responsible for the biggest screw up in the human history.

I will tell you one thing, a world ruled by women would be a better place. We (men) are lacking the mental capacity to rule it properly, which is not a surprise given we are the inferior half of the humanity.

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focus

the clock is wrong again
I closed eyes a tick ago
after shave - my face is purple
the breakfast - bread and cheese

the subway caries 300 in the morning
the important thing is that I arrive
behind the folders my coworker smokes
of course I’m late again

I am working hard
forgetting all, even love
a cup of coffee at 10, super strong
and then again work till dark

I speak little, only short phrases
for shape my pants dream
I don’t remember who, but somebody said it
at work is our second home

workday workday workday….

At dark I am getting home directly
it was hard day
in the cold outside my face is purple
I set the clock for 6…

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Sand fun

So, do you want to live forever? - You will…

Do you believe that we are getting reborn? - Yes, we are, in a way…

The human body is built by atoms and molecules and it is held together by nothing but atomic forces. There is no magic and no divine force. Our body consist of mostly water - 60% or so. We are water.

So when we die all the chemical elements which we called ‘our body’ before are floating away to become again part of stones, trees, flowers, water and somebody else’s body. In the same way they were part of somebody or something else before they were ‘us’. Some of the atoms in your and mine bodies were part of the nebula that formed the solar system billions of years ago. Some of our atoms were part of William Shakespeare, or Mozart, or even Jesus if he ever existed.

We are nothing but sand sculptures built sand grain by sand grain and washed away one day, so the sand grains can become another sculpture. We are nothing but imperfect iterations of a process which we do not  seem to be able to comprehend.

So, there is no need to fear death, for death do not exist!

When we die, the system which we call our body is not losing any matter  The system just transforms - into water, or somebody else. More like Lego bricks, you destroy one figure and use the bricks to create something new.

What is the driving force behind life? Is there driving force at all or we are just advanced stones…

Spinoza says: to be able to exist is power…

According to Nietzsche: “Happiness is the feeling that power increases - that resistance is overcome.” - that resistance in Physics is called Entropy. “A measure of disorder in the universe or of the availability of the energy in a system to do work.” It is also a measure of disorder; the higher the entropy the greater the disorder.

Lets look at Freud’s ‘dead drive’ - “The death drive (or death instinct), whose energy is known as anticathexis, represented an urge inherent in all living things to return to a state of calm: in other words, an inorganic or dead state.” (Freud).

According to Freud, unpleasure refers to stimulus that the body receives (noise, anxiety), conversely, pleasure is a result of a decrease in stimuli (for example, a calm environment the body enters after having been subjected to a hectic environment). If pleasure increases as stimuli decreases, then the ultimate experience of pleasure for Freud would be zero stimulus, or death. (quote from wikipedia)

So; to be able to exist is power (Spinoza), happiness is the feeling that power increases (Nietzsche) and ultimate pleasure is zero stimulus, or death (Freud). Then happiness and pleasure are completely different things. In fact they are exact opposite.

Think about this: Somewhere in the future you have only 5 minutes left to live… you are about to die. If you have the chance to get back in time, say at the time you read this blog, what would you do in a different way?

Make you life count, that’s all….

I just saw this interesting TED talk by George Smoot discussing some of the amazing design ‘patterns’ on which the universe is based. It is a very good talk and has some nice illustrations of the space-time machine we are part of.

They had to use super computer for a month to render some of the videos. Note that the pattern  when  looked at large scale is very very similar to the pattern you will see if you look at the neurons structure in a human (or animal) brain!

Mouse brain neuron and the universe

Amazing… this comparison should make any theologian and physicist to take a deep breath and  drink a glass of cold water.

It makes you wonder what actually is life. Is the universe… alive? Maybe life is just not that different than non-life.

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A Pool of Distant Galaxies – the deepest ultraviolet image of the Universe yet

What do you do when you want to see back in time? You look at the sky…

Sometimes it takes billions of years for the light from far objects to reach Earth. The light from some of the blinking dots you see in the sky has left them when there was no life on Earth. So, many years later you look at the sky and it is a window to the past. The scale of the universe and the time it takes for the light to travel so far makes me think that something with our perception of what time is, is terribly wrong. It feels like what we call time is actually a manifestation of something else.

I came across this image of deep space, released by ESA (European Space Agency). It is the deepest ground-based Ultraviolet image of the Universe ever obtained! Wow!

To get the photo, they had to pick a very dark area of the sky - where there are no closer object to interfere. It was a black spot.

Just look at the image - the place is full of ‘life’… or rather was. The Universe was just 2 billion years old when the light has left these stars and galaxies on its way to Earth. The estimated age of the universe is ~14 billion years. The solar system was formed ~5 billion years ago. So, we see how those galaxies looked when our solar system was just a nebula, a cloud of dust in space.

It looks like we live in a bubble of present time ‘reality’ and everything else around us is the past. The farther you look from this bubble, further back in time you see. The only factor in this ‘time machine’ is the size of the space. So, size does matter after all. It matters so much that we can see 12 billion years back in time.

If we go just little further (2 b. years more) we will reach an event horizon of the observable universe. The light from those objects is still traveling towards Earth, so there will not be much to see - another bubble this time of the observable universe.

Our fundamental laws of physics are based on observation and the presumption that an object is were it seems to be. For most of our daily life on Earth that is correct, not so on cosmic scale. The real universe is probably very different place now.

The human life is so short compared to the age of the universe we are not even on the radar. We are within the margins of the statistical error. We are lost in time.

Our life is an illusion - just a touch away…

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Jasper Johns - Three flags 1958

Smile, today you had a chance to witness  how history is made. To put things in perspective I will quote a discussion from a popular news site:

Dear Rest of The World We didn’t fuck it up

Signed,
America

Dear America, Congrats!

Regards,
Rest of the World

Dear America,
Will Palin’s new Fox News talk show be viewable in Canada?

Dear Canada
It will clearly be viewable from Russia.

Dear Russia,
Will Palin’s Fox News show view you?

Dear You,
Will you finally let me forget that dreaded name?

Dear the rest of America, Us in Alaska can’t forget it just yet. Would you please share our pain? Or should I say pa’in?

Dear Alaska
No

Dear Joe the Plumber. Go Fuck Yourself.

Never udnerestimate the wisdom  of “The Internets”…. :)

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There is no question that result of the elections in US today will create history.

It feels like a clash of two generations. Progressive  smart young candidate vs an old and loved by the lobbyists in Washington guy who likes to say “me and my friends” a lot.

Obama is the Internet super star. John McCain had to pay people to write pro-McCain comments on blogs. He seems to be the favorite of the ‘official’ media.

I don’t know if the American people realize how much is at stake in these elections. They are deciding if the world will have a fighting chance to become a great place or it will keep sliding towards ignorance.

There are some things I can’t comprehend:

- Why there are no IQ tests for politicians. Seriously.

- If this is a democracy then why is the software running on the  electronic voting machines not with open source license. Why can’t anybody go and check exactly how the  machine is counting the votes?

- There is only one company that makes these machines - Diebold. Only one! Most likely no biding contract.

- The CEO of that company announced (Aug, 2003) that he had been a top fund-raiser for G. W. Bush (WTF)

- why the new touch screen machine developed a strange ‘calibration’ problem which doesn’t go away when the machine is re-calibrated?

Do you know what Josef Stalin said about voting?

“Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.”

In the current democracies, it seems that whoever has more money to spend on advertisements wins the elections.  It is wrong. It basically means that whoever is more special interest friendly will have more money and win. Obama is probably the first candidate who managed to get some serious support from the internet and rise record funds. The old and ignorant guys like McCain are probably going bananas because the mega corp money are facing resistance.

So what is next, are the mega corporations rich enough to buy your vote? How much  would you ask for if they ‘d offer you money for your vote? How much is your freedom worth America?

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Amino acids after 4 billion years

If you ever wondered how did life on Earth began, wonder no more  - simple chemistry. Chemical reactions synthesized organic compounds from inorganic precursors. A recent publication regarding the results from the Miller-Urey experiment shows that he was actually more successful than he thought.  By using modern techniques it was shown that the experiment actually produced 22 amino acids and 5 amines not just 5 amino acids as Miller reported in 1953.

So what’s the big deal? The amino acids are considered the building blocks of life. “Just as the letters of the alphabet can be combined to form an almost endless variety of words, amino acids can be linked in varying sequences to form a vast variety of proteins.” In other words, put some in a pond of water and 4 billion years later you will have democratic elections.

That’s right, there is no need for God to exists. Life is just natural phenomenon.

Our inferior minds are the reason for the concept of god. We refuse to accept that life has no father and no mother. We refuse, we are afraid to accept that we are on our own. In our mind we need somebody to protect us, a parental figure responsible for us. We are like kids lost in the universe, looking for our father to protect us. Wake up, he doesn’t exist.

There were thousands of gods in the history of humanity. Wars were fought in their name and millions died and nobody remembers those gods anymore. What do you think will happen with the gods we currently believe in? They will die, with us… because they don’t exist outside of our imagination.

Which God would allow 5 years old kids to die from leukemia? Which God would allow killing of his creatures, animals for our amusement? None! We are delusional.

Nothing should be believed except that which was tested through direct observation and logical deduction:

Epicurus 341-270 BC

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but no able?
Then he is not omnipotent.

Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.

Is he both able, and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?

Is he neither able not willing?
Then why call him God?”

~Epicurus 341 BC

There is no need to fear God! Epicurus had the answer without any knowledge in microbiology, spectroscopy and amino acids - 2300 years ago. If you ever want to have a philosophy about life - read Epicurus.

A misused concept, God is causing more troubles than good at this point. It is like we still live in the dark ages of human civilization! “Fear, and you will save your soul” - this is something you should never accept! “God told me to make war” - this is something you should never believe!

Why are we still tolerant towards the ignorance of religious people? Why are we still fighting religious wars? Why are we allowing to be controlled by delusional religious “messiahs” that “talk” with God?

Earth as seen from 6.4 billion km away, photographed by Voyager 1

Life is a product of the natural evolution of the universe.  There is nothing extraordinary about Earth  - just a dot in middle of nowhere.  Look at the picture that Voyager 1 took when it was 6.4billion km away. Do you see the blue dot? That’s Earth.

Everybody you know is there. All of your hopes and dreams are there too. Everything you will ever have is on that dot.

It is sad that one day it will all disappear. In about 1 billion years the Earth will become so hot, all the oceans will evaporate. No life will be able to survive. About 3 billion years later the Earth will disappear into the Sun.

So, when you think about all this - amino acids, billions of years, the inevitable death of Earth… does it feel like it was all created by some super being? Why did God had to create this enormous universe and place us in the middle of fucking nowhere? Why not just create a completely black sky? It will get the job done. It will keep us on Earth occupied with whatever he wants us to be occupied.

What would be the purpose to create us and then disappear for thousands of years?  If he is omnipotent, he could have just made us “ready”, without the need to evolve following some commandments. It just doesn’t make any sense.

Do you know what the most ridiculous thing in the bible is?  - How he created the Earth in 6 days. Why 6 days and not instantaneously? And who was taking the notes about what exactly he said and did while creating the Earth?

For me personally, all I need to realize that there is no god is to see suffering animal.

God is dead, it is official…