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Idiocracy

Idiocracy

I just saw a rather interesting movie and thought to write a bit about it.

Idiocracy (2006) is a a dystopian black comedy, directed by Mike Judge. It’s a story about a man and a woman who in the year 2005 are ordinary by their intellect and who take part to a secret military hibernation experiment that goes awry. The two wake up in 2505. During the 500 years that has passed the world they knew has turned into a big garbage pile populated by retarded people who live in very simplistic pleasures and pains. This is basically a result of smart people not reproducing and stupid people reproducing like rabbits during the centuries.

I think the story has potential to more than what the movie turned out to be. Still, this is an interesting, original and pretty funny (and in a way scary) piece, all in all. I think I haven’t seen a movie like this one before when it comes to the main themes of it. The themes of the movie offer good food for though. If you are a social darwinist you get some super ammunition from this movie to your worldview, but the same is true to a secular humanist who speaks for the need of a good general education and an awareness about dangers of big corporations and a media that is centralized into few hands. What ever your worldview is, you are most likely going to have some serious thoughts about the future the movie paints. Unless you live in an idiocracy, I guess.

Unlike anti-utopias The Brave New World of Aldous Huxley and 1984 of George Orwell, Idiocracy does not have totalitarian dimension in it at all. If Idiocracy would have the totalitarian dimension in it, the movie would have become much more realistic than it is now. This is the main thing this movie is missing in order to be a true classic in my books. But then, this was aimed to be a comedy, not a more realistic anti-utopia. The director Mike Judge is after all previously known for Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill. I wish that someone else will create a movie that combines the dumbing down of population and the totalitarian elements. That would have a potential to be the next really big movie among the classics of this kind.

When it comes to the real life and real development in the world today, both totalitarian and dumbing down of people-elements can be found. There are tons of examples of both, and I give you here just two of them to reflect on: Dumbing down of America (free pdf.-book about America’s education system) and Alex Jones’ Endgame – the blueprint for global enslavement. Well, let’s take also third one here: Fox News – that is also featured in the movie and for a good reason. I am sure you can come up with much more than that as certainly as you can find family members represented in Idiocracy from your neighbohour today.

Conspiracies

bearthinking

Talk about conspiracies has grown a lot in the last ten years. There has always been talking about conspiracies but some ten years ago such was not that much in the mainstream than it is nowadays. The internet has clearly played an important role in this. I know that from a personal involvement.

Prior to the events of 9/11 I wasn’t really that much interested in conspiracies. By the word ”conspiracy” I got into my mind persons who had taken Robert Anton Wilson’s and Robert Shea’s The Illuminatus!-trilogy a bit too seriously. Such persons seemed to me to be suffering from some sort of mental problems or having a weird pathological tendency to think fantastic anti-Occam’s razor explanations to events. I didn’t see anything fascinating in it. On the contrary, such was – and is – rather repugnant and irritating to me. Fantasy is great when it is kept in its proper realm but when it is slipped into explanations of the world of five senses and the laws of physics it is sheer lunacy.

To me, the most interesting conspiracy prior to 9/11 was that of the John F. Kennedy assassination. The official explanation that a lone nutjob Oswald did it just didn’t seem to make much sense in the light of all the evidence. I was curious about the case but I didn’t really explore it as it didn’t deal importantly enough with my life and my pastime interests were elsewhere. This was in the early 90’s.

Years passed. I got married with an American. 9/11 happened. From the very beginning I sensed that there was something rather odd in the whole event. Nevertheless, I initially took the official explanation of the events as true. Because of my family connection to the States the whole event became much more close and personal to me than it would have otherwise been. I followed closely how the whole ”war on terror” unfolded. Then, one day, a friend of mine sent me some links to websites that questioned the official explanation of the event. My friend whom I knew to be a rather rational person and not prone to some ridiculous conspiracy theories seemed to be serious about them. I was intrigued and visited those websites. That changed my world.

I was shocked. My worldview got a major hit. If you looked at the events of 9/11 with an Occam’s razor the official story didn’t make sense. The event was a world-changing one. It wasn’t something that stayed just on an American soil. This was a start of a new cold war, if you will. This was affecting the whole world. And all of a sudden I found out that I was a ”nutjob conspiracy theorist”, according to some. It was a bizarre situation to find myself in, to say the least.

I became active in exploring the whole thing. The deeper you got the uglier it got. I became active in the 9/11 Truth movement, discussing a lot about it, reading a lot about it, watching a lot of documentaries and clips about it, taking a part to a special ”conspiracy”-seminar in a university here, and I was also organizing one relatively big 9/11 Truth movement occasion here in Finland in 2008. I did this and much more, to put years of an active involvement in a way too small nutshell.

Hmm.

Back in the 90’s much of what now goes under the concept ”conspiracies” was just about an honest, open minded and critical look at the world. Not anymore. Back in the 90’s being a ”conspiracy theorist” was something else. Being a ”conspiracy theorist” now (and I’m talking about 9/11 here) seems to mean to many that by questioning the official story you are automatically a weirdo who hates America and who tends to think that 9/11 was an inside job just because it is supposedly psychologically easier to handle than thinking that 19 fanatical muslims did it – and that it gives meaning to your otherwise meaningless life. Not true. I don’t hate America and I think it is psychologically much tougher to think that someone else than 19 bearded cavemen did it and that what we are fed with is lies about the event. I am not a weirdo who would not have better things to do than to dwell on this. I had life before of 9/11 and I still do. I think it just makes sense to try to understand the world we live in and to love the truth of things and to not like being fooled and to not like living in a big contextual bullshit. Period. That is common sense.

By definition, there is nothing new about a ”conspiracy”. A conspiracy can be defined as:

1) An agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subersive act.

2) A group of conspirators.

3) An agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime or accomplish a legal purpose through illegal action.

4) A joining or acting together, as if by sinister design.

The world is full of conspiracies and has always been full of various kind of conspiracies, big and small. You can find conspiracies all the way from your own workplace to the big world politics today. And if you have any knowledge of history you should be able to think of various well known and true historical conspiracies immediately. There is nothing odd about conspiracies or thinking that such have existed and still do exist. They have always existed and always will exist.

As it is today, when it comes to 9/11, it seems to me that the official story is becoming more and more viewed as a ”nutjob conspiracy theory” – a theory that is more against the Occam’s razor than the most known theories that question it. No wonder that the 9/11 Truth movement has not got diminished by the years but has got much bigger and stronger, gaining support not only from laymen, but also from scientists and top politicians alike throughout the world.

For those of you who are interested in all of this and are new to this thing, check out for the starters these websites: 9/11 Truth, Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth and 9/11 blogger. Also check out the documentaries 9/11 Mysteries, Loose Change the Final Cut and 9/11 Press for Truth. Also worth checking are Dr. David Ray Griffin’s lecture 9/11 – The myth and the reality and an ex-MI5 agent Annie Machon’s thoughts on the subject. You might also like to see what Dr. Niels Harrit from Denmark have recently found out about the event with an international team of physicists, what Japanese top politician Yukihisa Fujita has done about the thing in Japan and what an ex-general of all American intelligence has to say about this.

Call me a nutjob if you want.

Piece of shit

Portioned snuss in a beautiful container sold by Handfaste in Stockholm.

Portioned snuss in a beautiful container sold by Handfaste in Stockholm.

Snuss is is a moist powder tobacco product. It has a way longer history in Europe than pipe tobacco or cigarettes. Thanks to the EU this traditional form of tobacco became banned in all EU member states in 1992. The reason for this was WHO’s recommendation to ban it. I wonder why on earth they recommended to ban snuss instead of cigarettes that are proven to be way more hazardous to health. It must be a matter of popularity and economy involved just like it is with coffee. Logically, if snuss is banned for health reasons also other forms of tobacco should be banned, as well as coffee and all alcohol. Anyway, as Finland joined the EU in 1995 it meant that snuss was out of stores here. It meant the end of the most traditional European tobacco here, but oh boy does it feel good to know that there are authorities who in their wisdom know what is best for us.

Exemption to EU’s big brother hand regarding snuss was given to Sweden in 1995 when it also joined the EU. I don’t remember the reason for this but I think it must be about snuss’ strong place in Swedish culture or something like that. Well, having lost snuss on this side of the Gulf of Bothnia what could be the closest substitute? I guess it must be mämmi, the traditional Finnish Eastern pudding. Like snuss, also mämmi looks like shit. Actually, mämmi looks way more like shit. Not only does it look like shit, it also tastes like shit. Well, to be exact, I imagine that it tastes like that. I have not at least yet tasted shit but I think mämmi must be pretty close to that. Maybe the reason why Sweden got an exemption on snuss in the EU was because they don’t have mämmi in Sweden. It would have been too good for Finns to have both mämmi and snuss. Too bad for Finns who prefer snuss over mämmi, though. I am one of those unlucky.

When it comes to the joys of the EU this is of course just a relatively unimportant thing in the big picture. There are far greater joys in it and it is just getting better year by year.

Games

Aleister Crowley and Fernando Pessoa playing chess in Lisbon.

Aleister Crowley and Fernando Pessoa playing chess in Lisbon.

I’ve never been much into playing games. Computer games, board games, card games, or ”silly games” with humans. Games generally seem to me like escapism and a waste of time, a genuinely and amazingly stupid way to spend time. I would most likely get frustrated with most games in the same way I would get frustrated if I would have no choise but to sit on my ass some four hours a day in front of a television watching something like Sex and the City or American Idol. I would rather pick up a good book, draw something, write something, create something with my own hands or make love. Most of games like most of television content can get me rather frustrated. They can make me feel that I am losing minutes of my life, that I could use that time doing something much more enjoyable, creative and meaningful using my brains and the rest of my body. Most of games and television content represent me something like soma of Aldous Huxley’s The Brave New World - a mind paralyzing drug that allows one to flow smoothly and vegetably blissfully in the flow of time without any meaningful active role in it, all the way towards ones grave. And then the big game – ones life – is over.

Well, that is just what the word ”games” often brings to my mind. I am not saying that people who watch television programs or play games that I don’t care about are stupid or that they are doing stupid things, or too much some stupid things. Different kinds of games might have a meaningful place in the totality of their lives. Certain amount of light fun has its place in ones life, the big game, for sure. And who am I to judge how others spend their  time? I think that most people think that what I am doing with my life is unthinkably odd and maybe also stupid. And certainly I could play the big game better, as anyone else, for that matter.

If life is looked as the big game, I think it is at its best about learning what that game is all about, learning its pieces and those pieces functions, the games goal or meaningful direction, and learning to become happy with it and enjoying the game. When it comes to the big game one might have got a more or less good cards into ones hands. Certain elements of that game can’t be changed, they are given to us. What is interesting is how one plays with the cards one has and how one signifies the whole big game. It can be played in many ways.

Playing games is certainly an interesting thing peculiar to our species. Like humor, it is a child of our consciousness, a way to be able to think what we are thinking about, to step out of the immediate stimulus-response cycle and to see things in a broader context and well, to play with it all. If you are interested in reading about life as the big game, I recommend you to get your hands into Robert S. de Ropp’s awesome tome The Master Game. I’ve gained quite a bit from that book.

When it comes to ”smaller games” there are some of them that I have enjoyed for a shorter or longer period of time. Tetris is fairly brainless stimulus-response fun that I used to play a bit too much at some point of my life. I can still enjoy it in small doses. It appeals to my hippocampus. Worms2 must be my all time favorite computer game. It has a wicked black humor in it and has some strategic dimension too. I haven’t played it in ages but I know I would get kicks out of it also today. I bet there is no other game around that has such a fantastic arsenal of weapons, like an exploding salvation army tambourine player, exploding old mumbling granny, super banana bomb, holy hand grenade and a crowd of exploring mad cows, among other such lethal things.

Of all the smaller games chess is my clear all time favorite. I got into it when I was a teenager in the 80’s. I had just got introduced to life and writings of Aleister Crowley and found out that among other things ”the wickedest man in the world” was also one hell of a chess player. I dug up a chess that I had got as a present some years before and got myself to playing that I still active do. As a matter of fact I am playing chess almost on a daily basis over the internet nowadays and I play the game more than ever before. While writing this entry I have made several moves on the board.

Why I like chess? Because I see it as life in a small size. It has a serious side in it and I find it also just plain fun. The board is like a physical frame of ones life. The pieces of the game are like various elements of one’s life. They have different functions and value in the game. One day I might write a book called Life as Chess pondering how different pieces of the game represent different physical, social and ”soul”-parts of ones whole being. Just like in life ones moves in the game pave the way to what is to become reality. Step by step the game proceeds. Just like in life the moves are choises towards the future. Chess is not just a game to me but also a kind of mirror to my own thinking of various things. I’ve learned some things of myself by playing it in addition to just enjoying the playing. I’ve learned to look  at the big game of life with a bit better strategic eye by playing chess. Undoubtedly people learn that kind of things from other smaller games too. There was a time a friend of mine was intensively playing Starcraft, a game that just wasn’t for me, and apparently he was learning all kinds of things out of it in relation to the big game in addition to just having fun. Another friend of mine has done the same by playing poker.

I started this entry by saying that I’ve never been much into playing games. That was a lie, as is evident to you by now. Everybody is playing games in one way or another – just for the fun of it or for gaining something by doing it. Or both. Somebody might protest that labeling life as a game is profoundly erroneous, that it signifies it all wrong. I’m not getting into that now. But oh well, this entry is getting too long. I’m going to make a move in a chess now.

I’m back

Hello all. I’m back. It’s over a year since I posted anything here. One of the reasons for this is that I needed to do other things. Another reason was that I lost access to the blog. Thanks to WordPress staff that I got my access back and got the blog running again.

Lots of stuff has happened since my last entry. I think I am not going to all of it now, maybe a bit in bits and pieces later. I guess that I’m continuing to post YouTube-clips and pics like previously but I’ll try to just write more stuff than previously. Well, let’s see. Good to be back.

American dream

OMG, like totally!

Mitä sinä sanoa?

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