Archive for the ‘Science’ Category

Who has unsafe sex, is now not only likely to STDs or HIV to rise, the chance you have of getting cancer has increased enormously in recent years. Indeed, oral sex has become the biggest cause of cancer in the last twenty years in young men. Teenage girls in the secondary standard recently vaccinated against HPV, human papillae virus. Doctors now want that boys will also be vaccinated, because since twenty years the virus often develops following a throat infection.

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In another new development at what seems to be the latest rage, companies firing employees over tweets or status updates, let me for a moment pontificate about the philosophical consequences of these new developments. If you haven’t heard the person fired in this case was CNN reporter Octavia Nasr and her crime was expressing a condolence for some Muslim cleric that passed away. I wont go into that as to an intelligent reader its already obvious that the whole ‘might is right’ policies regarding these definitions are so absurd that it even becomes kind of unphilosophical to keep talking about them, let us instead ponder about what the consequences of this sort of policy are for humanity in the long term.

A ‘tweet’ or a ‘status update’ is not an official publication. It is a quick thought you pen down to a network of supposed ‘friends’. We have learned now that such ‘quick thoughts’ are enough reason to lose your job. I can think of circumstances where such would even be somewhat justified, but in this case the expressing of condolences seems to me perfectly legal.

But what are the real ramifications here? Isn’t it that companies through these media now have large control over our thoughts? How much time will it take before companies can fire employees not because of what they express but because of what they think? If you think that idea is far away, you are not very up to date about the developments in human-computer interfaces.

It is very well possible to create an interface that directly links the brain to the computer. Such interfaces have already been build. Think about the enormous implications of that, especially if the computer learns to execute commands of the brain. You could simply think of a book and the computer would write it at the speed of your thoughts. You could visualise a website and the computer builds in in 3 nanoseconds.

Think also of the enormous dangers: viruses now do not only destroy your computer but can also directly effect your brain. You could be remotely controlled without even knowing it. And: in a company where everyone is hooked up to such a brain-computer device the employer could simply fire you for thinking something.

We are not far from that point at all if we fire people for a quick thought via a tweet or status update. I am all for responsibility and I don’t think an employee can make official publications that would seriously downgrade his company, but that is not what we are discussing here. We are talking here about giant corporations that think they have the right to determine what you can and cant say in your private life, not about the company but about a political matter. Think about it. That is very serious and very wrong.

The lesson, for now, seems to be mostly not to add your employer to your list of ‘friends’, but unfortunately it isn’t as simple as that. There’s always people who will rat you out, and show your tweet to your employer anyway. No, the solution here, especially in sight of the enormous risks of interface developments, is new legislation about what governments, companies and other institutions can do with our personal lives. There are too many unguarded and unthoughtful and very very risky scientific developments going on at the moment, and without some serious monitoring we will all live to see the day that we regret not having acted now against the dangers these developments imply.

Martijn Benders

Martijn Benders is a philosopher and a member of Novo Universalis, a centralist Think-tank that aims to help humanity evolve.

It sounds unlikely, but then again this city is one of the most unlikely places on earth anyway: there’s an official butterfly plague going on in Istanbul. Yesterday I saw to my amazement that there were hundreds if not thousands of butterflies flying through the neighbourhood where I live. My wife told me it was all over the turkish news too. There’s a butterfly plague. I have never even heard of the possibility. What could have caused it?

It must have been that some natural enemy of the butterfly has been wiped out in some ecological disaster. Or could there be another explanation? Who are the natural enemies of butterflies anyway? Wasps perhaps. Haven’t seen a wasp in ages! And wasps are known to feed on butterfly larvae. But as butterflies also do pollination, they might be the solution for a lack of pollination due to bee or wasp starvation which is a huger ecological problem than most other ones. Once plants and flowers cant pollinate any more they are finished and you can say goodbye to crops, fruits and vegetables.

Meanwhile, I cant say this is the worst plague I have witnessed so far. The sight of hundreds of butterflies surrounding my house is a spectacular sight. My stomach feels differently, luckily, for falling in love must be one of the worst things that could happen to a writer. Or to anyone else, really. A writer should be jaded like the butterfly – spreading the golden dust of youth to intoxicate others but hardly touching it himself.

Eduardo Gold is a Peruvian ‘inventor’ that won no less than 200.000 dollars for a local project he had invented from a Worldbank Finance project for young innovations. The project? Eduardo is going to paint the entire Andes mountaintops white.

If you didn’t fall out of your chair yet, let me help you somewhat. The idea is that ‘by painting the entire mountaintops white’ the glaciers and snow ‘will melt less quickly’ which as we all supposedly know they do really fast now because of Global warming.

Can you picture the bureaucrats at the Worldbank gloating over this brilliant idea? Lets give this guy a lot of money to save the Glaciers! Never mind that you actually cant paint under a thick layer of snow, its the idea that counts! Never mind that paint is highly toxic, never mind that you are destroying the entire ecosystem on these mountains, we have found the solution to the melting glaciers problem! Just paint it! He’s a genius and so are we at the World bank!

Those poor Peruvians will lose their tourist industry, their local ecosystems and their wonderful view because some idiot gets a lot of money form the World bank to pollute the environment. Why? Well maybe the glaciers will melt a day later. An applause please for these brilliant minds, after bio-diesel they found another way to fuck up our environment with incompetent, absurd and highly spurious and costly measures.

Please, please, please get some competent people in control. People that actually have some knowledge about science and the environment. People who can think for more than 3 seconds in a row. People who do not love to waste everyone’s money with totally idiotic ideas.

So I decided that, since these people love to waste money, I’d just as well send them a mail with my own brilliant proposition. If they ever reply, I’ll let you know. Here’s the mail I have send:

Dear Worldbank,

Mr Platinum aka Martijn Benders
www. loewak.nl

What is wrong with a psychiatric industry that is financed by drug companies? Well isn’t that very obvious: they will try and try to classify more and more mental conditions as ‘diseases’ simply because their financers want them to do so. Nowadays children can’t behave like children anymore or they are ‘hyperactive’ or diagnosed as ‘ADHD’ and pumped full of drugs of which no one knows what the long term consequences of their use are.

At the same time, digg this, there was a recent research into which jobs have the highest suicide rates. Guess what? Yes, doctors and Psychiatrists rank amongst the highest, the most number of suicides take place in that job catagory.

Ask yourself this: why do these rather suicidally depressed people want to drug everyone? Because that’s basically what the new ‘Psychiatric Manual’ named ‘the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

“With DSM-V, American psychiatry is headed in exactly the opposite direction: defining ever-widening circles of the population as mentally ill with vague and undifferentiated diagnoses and treating them with powerful drugs,” Professor Shorter of the University of Toronto writes in the Wall Street Journal.

New diseases in the thick manual include the ‘Psychosis Risk Syndrome’ which is a particular type of ‘disease’ that can be streched to encompass half the world population. Twitch your eye? Behave a little weird? Have a stutter? Well, those might be signs of you having PSR which basically means you have the potential to become psychotic and, according to the manual, must be treated with drugs.

Symptoms of “psychosis risk syndrome” include vague descriptors as “disorganized speech.”

“Minor neurocognitive disorder” describes a reduction in cognitive function over time, such as that normally experienced by people over the age of 50, while “temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria” refers to children who suffer from outbursts of temper.

The psychiatric industry has become a drugdealer culture. All these drugs do not just effect the people that take them but dissapear and mix with the environment. So ALL OF US are effected by these billions of tuns of chemical drugs that are pumped into the various water systems.

You cannot solve a problem with drugs. Psychiatric problems are PROBLEMS, not ‘chemical inbalances’, the people who want you to believe they are physical necessities are idiots. A chemical markup is an endresult, not a cause. Anyone can simply change the chemical balance in their body. Dont believe me? Sport all day and laugh at and greet everyone you see. At the end of the day the chemical balance of your body will be completely different. To put the chemical balance as the cause rather than the effect of a problem is only good for one thing: druglords.

So we have a bunch of drug companies, a bunch of depressed suicidal doctors, a manual and an entire population of ‘chemically inbalanced people’. Is that the result of the last 100 years of psychiatric ‘research’?
Aren’t these people ashamed of themselves?

The idea that Jesus died on a cross is probably a wrong interpretation of Biblical texts. That’s what a Swedish scientist concludes after studying historic texts. Theologian Gunnar Samuelsson of the Göteborg University claims that Jesus never got crucified but instead was hanged unto a pole.

The scientist claims there is no literature that explicitly mentions the crucifiction. In the Bible they write only about the ‘staurus’ Jesus had to carry up the Golgotha mountain, a word which a lot of historians have translated as ‘cross’ but which should be much accurately translated as ‘pole’, the Swedish scientist suggests.

Roman, Greek and Hebrewe literature suggests that executions where people were nailed unto a cross have not been existant in the ancient days of the roman empire at all, says Samuelsson. Hanging prisoners unto a pole, however, was quite common in those days.

Samuelsson thinks the image of Jesus on a cross exists because of the imagination of ancient artists that were made long, long after his death.

‘There are simply no description of Jesus or anyone else in that time being crucified’ Samuelsson says, ‘the whole thing is based upon imagination and myth’.

Samuelsson vermoedt dat het beeld van Jezus aan het kruis is ontstaan door artistieke afbeeldingen die veel later zijn gemaakt.

Will Mel Gibsson remake his rather kitschy torture episode ‘Passion of the Christ’ now? Maybe a bit less dramatic, with a pole instead of a cross? Beyong doubt lack of nails and blood wouldnt fare well with hollywood audiences. And what about all these people wearing crosses around their necks, will they now be replaced with poles? Are we going to hear ‘He poled for your sins’ now when we get lectured?

These are exciting times!