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Year Zero part Duex

If you haven't read my post "Year Zero" please do so now. For those that have you might find it interesting to know that the folks at CERN have been slapped with a lawsuit. Apparently some people in Hawaii believe that if the Hadron collider due to start operations in July is turned on it can create a black hole or other strange particles. In theory one or both of these things can start to devour all matter and pretty much eat the earth. Also in theory there is Hawking radiation that sort of keeps these things in check. Either way it brings to light my original assumption that scientists love to play with things that they don't understand. Thats the whole basis of science, to find things out. But that definitely does not mean that just because we can that we should. You can read more about the lawsuit here.

New Miracle Weightloss Diet!

So now that Easter is finally over and everyone has gained about 10lbs from eating too many Cadbury Creme Eggs. Its time for you to lose some weight! Now there are several ways to do this. You could simply not eat. Probably not an option for most people unless you are from a third world country or are an experienced yogi. You could run 10 miles a day. If you can run 10 miles a day you probably aren't fat. Or you could simply wear your sunglasses... Well they have to be blue tinted of course. Studies show that blue food is unappetizing. So in theory if you wear a pair of blue sunglasses whilst eating it will trick your brain into not wanting to eat it. Of course this wouldn't work in anything yellow like Twinkies. Although a green Twinkie sounds pretty nasty... Of course you will need to order your glasses from Japan because they are the only ones weird enough to sell them..

Bigfoot, Gay Aliens, Zombies, and More!

So some of you old fogy's like me will remember Kids in the Hall. For the rest of you go check out the kids over at Dutch West. I spent the better part of my morning laughing my ass off! They do a lot of film parodies and make fun of how stupid commercials are. Enjoy!
Zarnia from Dutch West on Vimeo.

Death Cab for Cadbury

The folks over at Pimp That Snack! have a wonderful how-to for making the worlds biggest Cadbury Creme Egg. Now thats a delicious death! Cheers to Amelia for the link.

Must Have Product!

Has something changed in your life? Do things just not look right? Want things back just the way they were? Then Neuticles is for you! "With Neuticles. Its like nothing ever changed."

Country for Sale by Original Owner

Ok kids, its time for a new economic structure. One that is not solely based around greed and corruption. I'm a bit sick and tired of all these economists and financial executives pretending that they didn't know what they were doing. How they Alan Greenspan thought sub-prime mortgages were somehow a fantabulous idea. Here is the bottom line. I'm not a wal-street financial wizard or a some economist from Harvard or the CEO of some mega-corp or on the board of directors of some world bank but I could have told you that if you loan a fuck load of money to a person that can hardly afford to pay for their cell phone bill every month you are eventually going to have a problem.

Back when I purchased my house I spent a lot of time trying figuring out how much money I could spend. I looked at a few websites. Did a few calculations and with an interest rate of 4.5% came up with a comfortable number for my income at the time. That amount was $900 a month. At the time it was a reasonable amount, I purchased a lovely 100 year old Victorian house on just under half an acre for $140,000 no money down. Now the ONLY reason I was able to purchase this house was because the interest rate was 4.5%. I with my simple little mortgage calculator knew that if the rate was at 7% it would jack up the monthly payment to $1135 a month. Thats an extra $235 a month. A car payment. It was really simple to see that I wouldn't be able to purchase a house at that price. It was simple COMMON SENSE. So of course I still had another option though. It was called an ARM loan. Its basically is a loan were I start out at a low interest or interest only payment or an allotted monthly payment rate then after 3 or 5 years depending on the type of loan my interest rate will become variable. Oh a knight in shining armor! So the idea is that you can purchase a $250000 house for "the same price as renting an apartment". I'm sure that you have heard that little catch phrase a million times over the last 7 years or so. Remember that little saying that your mother always told you, "If its too good to be true then it probably is...". Well for all you loan officers that got rich a few years ago and are playing dumb out there this is one of those too good to be true moments. Lets do the basic math. You have your introductory monthly payment and since my current rent is $700 a month we will go with that. $700 a month is do-able for most people. Even for some that are making a low wage. Well hell a $250000 house for $700 a month thats great! My dream of purchasing a home will finally come true. Well lets see though... That price is only good for 5 years what happens then? Well a $250000 loan at a variable rate that went up to 7% during that 5 years makes my monthly payment somewhere around $2027 a month. Of course with all my 50 cent raises I'll be making more money by then. Housing bubble? No, there will never be a housing bubble. So since I am not a complete idiot, like 1/5 of all of you dip-shits that blindly trusted your loan officer and didn't take the 30 minutes to figure out how much you can afford, I purchased my humble house with no money down and a fixed 4.5% rate. 5 years later I sold it for $200000 and made about $50000.

So back to our economy. We have a very unique system here in the US. Our economy is built around consumer spending (thanks Franklin D!). Basically its an engine. The more people spend the more it grows. Sounds great! And it worked for a while. Got us out of the great depression. But then this interesting thing started to happen. Instead of families being able to afford a nice house and a nice car on one income and having a nice retirement to look forward to, both husband and wife had to work. Benefits got stripped away. People were spending so much of their income just to LIVE that they needed to borrow money. And of course the cocaine of business is to make money off of money. There really isn't a more corrupt system than that except for may be insurance which is probably the meth of business. So people get into debt, greedy rich people get richer and everyone else gets poorer. But there is an underlying infection in this system its called the stock market. You see big businesses these days are tied into the stock market. They are required to keep their stock holders happy. Otherwise people won't invest and/or they may potentially sue you. So corporations are under a lot of pressure to increase profits so shares go up and stock holders and investor make more money. The idea being you invest your money to help this business grow then after a while you cash in your stock and you get paid for investing. It sounds great in theory (just like communism does) but in reality its not sustainable. Why you ask? Because there are basically 2 ways you can increase profits in a business. One is the long way. Which is making a good QUALITY brand of products that people will want to purchase and continue to purchase. Its making a long term investment and making decisions that take time but are ultimately rewarding. Like planting an apple tree and nurturing and pruning and treating all parts of the tree with respect so that you will have bushels of fruit for years to come. Just like how little baby Jesus taught people how to fish. Well in this day and age that takes too long. People don't have the patience or the attention span to put that much time and energy into something. So that leads us to the other way, the quick way. You start with a good product and market the hell out of it so tons of people buy it. Then you decrease expenses so that you increase profits. So you buy your apples from the store and hope that you have enough money to keep buying apples. So thats what most businesses do these days. Lets say you get drunk one day and decide to start a company that makes and sells oh lets say something that lots of poor suckers will pay too much for. Say, bottled water aptly named Purest Tap Water on Earth. Its great you are off to a good start, you have a strong brand and people are hooked. Thats great for a few fiscal quarters. Now what? Well since you are a hard hitting top CEO that graduated from Harvard you know what to do. Its easy you trim some fat and hold back supplies to increase the price. Great you are making more profits than your share holders can shake a stick at. For a few more quarters at least. So use that brain of yours whats next. Lean up the employee benefits a bit and may be source a cheaper product. Thats great! You are brilliant. The board of directors loves you. So whats next? Well we could just move our production over to China, layoff most of our employees, but first cut back on benefits some more so some of those people quit and we won't have to cover their severance. Well that worked ok but our stock is level and is actually going down a bit. Oh what now it tanked almost overnight you will have to sell this business off. Well its a good thing you won't be held accountable. Well just move on to the next company..... So what happened? Well its quite simple. The quality of your product goes to shit people stop buying your product, it too expense since consumers don't have any money because all of your college frat buddies running businesses down the road whom they work for took away their benefits and jobs just like you did. See corporations seem to forget that there is a system to the business. Employees are not just an expense. They are the engine that make the business run. They don't just make your product a reality they also control the quality of the product and also consumers of those products. A business is just like spokes on a wheel. Yes you can make the tire cheaper by removing the spokes of the wheel but take away too many your tire is flimsy and will eventually fall apart. Even a child without an MBA from Stanford running a lemonade stand understands that. So this is what our economy has become because of the greed of the stock market and greed of the rich. A flimsy tire. The quality of the US is literally going down and getting more expensive. We have outsourced our jobs and cutback on benefits. We have put people into so much credit debit that the businesses loaning the people loaning money are selling off their businesses. Unemployment is starting to go up. The gap between the rich and the poor is widening. People are treating the US dollar like it has herpes for the first time. Its time for a new system folks. Read and understand the next sentence very carefully... It is "too good to be true" to have a sustainable economic system based solely on increasing profits. It is simply not possible, just like communism failed so will consumerism. Its because people are greedy. And because of the greed of the nation soon we will have to sell off America. Any buyers? Better brush up on your Mandarin.

Barack Obama

For those of you that have yet to experience Barack Obama please watch. I truly believe that this guy is the real deal and could potentially be one of the best greatest presidents this nation has had since JFK.

A History of Evil

Here is a cool little animation about the history of evil by Ole-Magnus Saxegard called "A History of Evil".

Silent Speech

So the folks over at a company called Ambient Corporation have developed a product called Audeo. Its a device that you wear on your neck that can pick up nerve signals from your vocal cords. So with a little training and practice you can talk on the phone without actually speaking. Why didn't I think of that! Here I am using up energy breathing like a sucker. Check out the video.

Freedom of Speech

Take a gander at this website Wikileaks.org. Its a site that refers to itself as "an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking and public analysis". They facilitate anonymous, encrypted uploading of documents that the general public was never meant to see. Such as the offshore banking practices of swiss banks and all sorts of goodies about the inner workings of Scientology. And subsequently they have been shut down and censored illegally by all sorts of evil corporations and our untrustworthy government on several occasions. So take a peek before corporate America finishes wiping their asses with the Constitution and flushes..

Utah's Brilliant Legislature

So if you haven't heard already. Our wonderful law makers have made it so that wine coolers and Mike's Hard Lemonade are sold only in liquor stores. They did this under the guise that these drinks are a gateway for teens to drink alcohol. This comes as no surprise as a majority of our leaders are Mormon. However what they didn't tell you is that by doing this it changes the scheduling of the alcohol so it is now taxed as hard liquor. So what we really got was a tax increase in sheeps clothing. Good job Utah. While we are at it we might as well make beer sold only in the liquor store as well. That way we can ensure that teens are not stealing that as well. May be then they can use the tax increase from that so they can do something useful like buying back main street from the Mormons. Utah, Life Elevated!

Site Outage

Well it looks like my blog is down, probably for maintenance. If you can read this post then its back up!

Witches of Eastwick

So here is an interesting article about a woman that was convicted in 1944 (not 1844) for witchcraft in Scotland. During the war she held a seance in which it was revealed that a warship had sunk. The government was holding back this information as a matter of national security. Since she didn't break any laws, the government used an old law to get her put away. So she was tried and convicted of witchcraft. Now the case is being presented to Queen Elizabeth to hopefully review and pardon. Read the article by Scott Horton of Harpers magazine here.

Toilet Smurf

So what is luckier than being born into a rich family? May be being born in a toilet. Yeah thats close.. How about being prematurely born in a toilet on a moving train falling through onto the tracks and still surviving? Now thats luck!! Well that is what happened to a baby girl in India. Read the full article here.

Human Simulation

So do you remember that movie "The Matrix"? Where everyone is hooked up to a life support system and is living in a virtual reality. Yeah, so you think that is actually science fiction? It may be more real than you know. Now before you think I am some conspiracy theorist understand that what I am about to tell you comes from the minds of many prominent scientists. Like Nick Bostrom of Oxford University. Not some vague website (like this one). he he he... So here it is. There is a greater mathematical probability that you are computer simulation than that of you existing as a human being. So here is how it works. Computer technology basically doubles about every 2 years or so. If things continue at that rate and assuming people advance beyond a stage one civilization (ability to harness star energy or fusion etc.), then virtual realities could be so advanced that the characters in them (thats you sucka) wouldn't even know that they are not real. You could be a simulation of someone that actually existed in the past. Or you could just be a bot that someone lovingly programmed. Yes my friends this universe is much stranger than you can even possibly imagine...