Convictions look good on the third hand. They simplify the appearance. I guess they may help in focusing all the efforts on something. But the price can be high. And the oddest thing is the you can easily overlook the price.

The question stays on: should I have any convictions at all? Maybe humanness should be one?

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Society that minimizes the chances for genius is probably a doomed one.

Determinancy and algorithmic behavior are expected of educational system. But when everything is planned there is very little place for future. Future is not something predicted, planned and awaited. Rather it consists of unexpected events. Genius is unexpected.

Although genius seldom receives a favor of mass, today society disposes of very effective tools against it. And no matter how paradoxical it can seem, education is at the top among these tools. Educations teaching so many pointless things ends up with people who prefer dullness. People who prefer dwelling in a special kind of slumber, lulled with TV ads, antidepressants, stock chart statistics and supermarkets.

They try to find a peace of mind (it is by the way instructive to think of reasons peace of mind became so demanded), and stopping to think at all is the shortest path there.

As long as chairs are comfortable they can stop caring about destination point of the train of life. Indeed, as long as competitive salary each month appears on the account one holds in some respected bank, he is welcome to stop thinking.

But if one day respected bank will collapse and staff reduction will appear instead of salary, there will be no time to learn to think.

And there will be no Superman, no Angel A, nobody to rescue the life.

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“Climate change” designers had played very well with feelings of being in danger and other tools of mind control. And it will be very naive to suppose that a lonely speech can compete with mass media monster. I write with a goal to be aware, to analyze the meaning of confrontation.

The major confrontation is a classic one: on the left are rich countries with U.S. at the head, on the right are poor ones. Carbon dioxide emissions are a false front. For third world introducing a constraint on emissions is the same as introducing a constraint on the development of all kinds of industries. It creates a total dependency, sustainable dependency. Apparently it sets the scene for political control, for pulling the money strings. In the long run this is a rush for resources. Developed countries oversaturated with induced necessities became colossi with feet of clay. They implicitly but very strongly depend on owners of natural resources – gas crises had shown the situation very well. In such conditions many territories owned by poor countries became tasty morsels and the battle rages on. In the beginning there were weapons in exchange for resources, than atomic power plants and other technologies. Today they offer monetary support that means another dependency – on the external currency – that will create a temptation to level down internal currencies and further decrease competitiveness of internal industries because of labour migration.

And all this is due to climate change. The invincible enemy, one for all. Do you know which enemy is the best? One that does not exist. You can always pretend you are fighting, organize global conferences translated on hundreds of languages, issue laws, request financial support.

Because the enemy you are fighting is so global, so complex, so dangerous. After the fine-tuned media treatments nobody will doubt the importance of fighting with this invincible enemy. Nobody will raise objections, because we are all in danger. Nobody will ask “why?”, because “no nation, however large or small, wealthy or poor, can escape the impact of climate change”. Nobody will think deeper, because we are already out of time. Nobody will listen the critics, because “the future of human civilization is at stake”. Nobody will take a scientific look because “this is not fiction”.

Otherwise, people now join movements to save the planet. Save the planet, the planet that is around for billions of years – doesn’t it sound stupid? TV shows that it does not. People buy printed T-shirts, get involved in countless discussions, scream on streets, smash shop-windows, set cars on fire. They are saving the planet. Haven’t they watched George Carlin?

Why don’t just say the truth? The truth is always around. Hardly there are much people who truly and studiously care about the nature. And it is natural, because people are educated that way. From the other hand mostly everybody cares about own comfort. And I think these panic is nothing but “don’t touch my comfort place of living” expression caused by fears and feelings of insecurity that are persistently forced in people with help of mass medias covering corpses in evening news.

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Progress is historically associated with society. In XX century mankind finally had its chance to see society in action.

No earlier century has witnessed as much killing. Population increases provided more people to kill; technological developments provided more efficient means to do so; and expanding media coverage informed more people about such killings and horrors as the century proceeded.

From An Age of Progress? by W. G. Moss

When I look at the portrait of John Bury, author of a classic work The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth written in 1920, I feel the presence of Victorian XIX century, colonial prosperity, steam ships, nobility, respectable people having time to dream ideas. This image has very little in common with XX and XXI centuries.

Yet silver-screens are still talking to us about progress and taxes to pay for it. Minds are in the grip of western thinking, or western religion if you will, a working model of control, but its shelf life is over it seems.

Society that consumes spoiled control model will go out of control at a certain time. And when it will happen simply replacing the control model will not fix anything, because problem can never be solved at the level it appeared. Upcoming debates at UN Climate Change Conference on CO₂ emissions and other topics will probably confirm above statement.

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A thought came to me after reading Redefining Philanthropy: Introducing The Citizen Effect, gratitude goes to Amy Carol Wolff.

As a matter of fact I know pretty much nothing about modern philanthropy and non-profit organizations, yet intuition tells me that something is wrong here.

To begin, non-profits are biased towards helping poor people with their lives.
I haven’t heard of any non-profit that aims to help rich people with their lives. Why? Or maybe rich people do not need help? Well, they are human beings too, they suffer just like anybody else.

In a discussion Dan Morrison argued that poor people spend most of their time satisfying basic needs. But what do other people do most of their time? Just the same: they satisfy basic needs. But basic needs are different: for ones it is water, for others it could be whiskey. Eradicating poverty just means that basic needs will change. It has nothing to do with happiness.

Nevertheless many great people are involved in philanthropic activity and they succeed. And if we imagine a timeline we will probably notice that nowadays non-profit organizations are more successful than they have even been. Considering this fact from system self-organization standpoint among conclusions to made one will be about immunity.

Poverty and richness are diseases of society. Richness parasitizes society but at the same time controls it. That’s why society needs (and produces) enthusiasts to deal with poverty. I can see a sort of analogy between immunity and charity efforts. The stronger the disease the harder the work will be for immune system. And today people work really hard.

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You know, in Paris there is a Starbucks on Champs-Élysées. I once was there and was very much confused. Imagine: a Russian tourist in France goes to American coffee store, Korean assistant says with American accent: “Bonjour monsieur!”, tourists orders Italian cappuccino, gets the cup made in China and really doesn’t know what is that correct language to say thanks.

The only thing that was missing there was a group of antiglobalists. Yet I didn’t check it carefully.

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Words by R.E.M.

Actually this post is about first pregnant woman on orbit. Have you heard about her?… Me too. But let us think for a moment and we will see that any theory of space settlement will break against reproduction.

Many words are spoken about humans who will conquer the space. Well, if you’ll take a look at facts you’ll see following numbers which tell their own tale:

• woman longest single flight is 195 days
• man longest single flight is 437.7 days

Is seems people who want to ‘invade’ space have a lot of work ahead.

People are designed for this planet not for space stations. To be able live at space station new ‘people’ should be designed for that, be born and grown up on space station. And there is only one way to achieve this: survival of the fittest.

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Even though they’re soldiers and know killing is part of their responsibility and duty, a number of them come to me very bothered about it…Our challenge is to assure them that what they are doing is morally acceptable from a Christian perspective and a patriotic one.

Major Eric Albertson, a Roman Catholic Chaplain in Iraq The Times, 8 Dec 2004, p.37

What a words! “Christian perspective“, “morally acceptable“. I almost feel the breathe of eternity and I’m sure I hear the laughter of idols.

Poor people. Ones came over the hills and far away to fight against people they have no idea about, other came to the same place to assure the former that killing is morally acceptable. Both of them are probably tormented by the desire to go home and by the intuition of overall stupidity of this situation.

I think in this case religion is just another pill to take.

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