Written Down

The Divine Spark (a humanity-based ontological argument)

2009-07-31T18:21:00.000-04:00

I believe there is a divine spark within every human being. Whether or not we actively acknowledge there is a supreme being, our lives and very existence manifest this truth in countless ways. We, as humans, have no means of obtaining intelligence outside of what is evident in our physical universe. We can devise endless ways and means to look at our physical universe. We can create endless ways and means to use and explore what we have but this crucial fact remains - our intelligence and our abilities are strictly limited and entirely dependent on what is already evident in our natural universe.

And though we cannot escape this simple, seemingly crippling, fact, it is within itself one of the most glorious revelations readily available to every human being. No other creature on earth develops generationally. Ants build colonies and work diligently to store up for the winter but future generations do not develop any further. Dogs can be taught amazing tricks that impress and amaze us but future generations do not even learn these feats, let alone develop them further. Only humans have the ability to develop generationally, learn generationally, advance generationally and create new ways and means to look, use and explore our world.

This is what sets the human race apart from all other creatures on this planet. If this whole world had really come from the same primordial goo, why would humans be the sole creatures capable of this feat? It doesn't make sense. The abilities and intelligence evident within humanity do not develop by themselves because it requires someone with intelligence to begin such a process. It's like a perpetual motion machine - even if it can run forever by itself, it still needs someone to start it. Such is human intelligence. No human is capable of doing or knowing anything outside of what is already evident within our natural universe; therefore, our abilities could not have come from anything within our natural universe for this ability is clearly not natural for the rest of the universe. We as humans are set apart and the very existence of these abilities demand a supernatural creation and beginning.

As a result, our abilities to create, develop and grow are demanding evidence that we, as human beings, are set apart from all other creatures and creations on this planet in such a way that there is no other possible reason except we are the direct creation of a supernatural being who's abilities and intelligence far exceed our own.

From the Vaults I

2009-06-04T15:01:00.001-04:00

I've recently unearthed my blog from an old myspace account and will be reposting some old classics up here again. Enjoy!

Originally written on Tuesday, August 29, 2006 at 1240am from Seoul Korea

ok, i'm in seoul, korea, it's one in the morning here and i am wide awake. not because of jet lag or slept on the way here or that i'm not tired.

it's because i was sleeping on the floor of the seoul airport lounge when i got up to see what time it was and the clock told me it was 8am. this sent me into a small panic for i was boarding at 915 and had yet to find my gate and go through security.

i ran to the bathroom, changed clothes and tried to look halfway presentable to my new employers whom i would be meeting in less than three hours. after five minutes, i ran out to find my gate while eating my breakfast of scoobydoo fruit snacks and the remains of my peanut butter jelly sandwich i discovered in my bag.

as i was half running with my guitar case on my back down the main hallway big enough to fit three semis side by side i began to wonder why asia's second largest airport was so quiet. i was the only person in the entire hall except for the disgruntled employee fighting her floor waxing machine. she wasn't having a good night by the looks of it.

it all becomes clear when i arrive at the main flight board and see that it is only 1240 which is why i am awake and writing this. my mood is progressively worsening because my butt hurts from the 15 hour flight the day before, my eyes hurt from watching more movies in that time than i've seen all summer, my head hurts from the headphones i was wearing whose unique sound specifications amplified all explosions and sound effects while dampening dialogue making these movies quite the painfully, thrilling experience, my legs hurt from being folded like pretzels in countless ways while trying to sleep and my finger hurts because i closed the bathroom door on it.

other than that, it's been a good experience and i will be writing again from the other side of the yellow sea. i think i'm going to try to sleep again but first, i'm going to reset a certain clock.

Fear & Loathing in Sudbury

2009-05-01T16:57:00.000-04:00

This miserable trade show could not have come at a worse time. Let's not forget that the only reason this sad, little city exists is because someone found nickel in the miles of endless rock up here. Yes, nickel...and I'll give you a whole bag of nickels if you can tell me three things in your house that contain nickel. No, that lame jokes you're thinking of right now doesn't count. Don't say it. I already did.

But back to this nickel business. I work in the mining industry and I don't even know what it's for. But let's not bore ourselves with the facts here. We all use this wretched metal in some way or another and it gets pulled out of the ground in this city at an extraordinary rate. From the unwanted fragments of trivia I've picked up, it seems they've been pulling this stuff out of the rock - not ground, mind you...there is no ground here...just rock - for more than 125 years.

125 years is a long time. I haven't done anything that lasted 125 years and I doubt you have either. And now that the playing field has been leveled, let's all admit together that even though we don't really give a rat's sass about nickel, if someone's been digging it out of the rock for 125 years, it must be worth something, right? Someone's buying this rotten metal and using for all kinds of good things and they've been doing a darn good job of it too for at least 125 years. Why else would they be digging through miles of endless rock?

Now all of that has been going on for at least 125 years when I show up on the scene. I tear into town doing 70 mph in my rented Toyota hoping a couple of days in this place will set my world on fire. Boy, was I wrong.

At that moment, the only thing on fire were my legs from the intensely boring four-hour drive. While the scenery is quite stunning, it's also stunningly repetitive. For example, the view along any northern highway is as follows - pine tree, rock, rock, pine tree, rock, pine tree, pine tree, random lake, pine tree, rock aaaaaaand you get the the idea. It goes on forever.

On a good day, you might see a deer. If so, slow down the car and let the thing get well on its way. They truly are wild, regal, majestic animals but they do struggle with basic calculations involving velocity, mass and direction. Hitting one is a lot less exciting and a lot less satisfying than you would think.

It was a little past 10pm so I found my hotel and promptly checked in. Thinking I should stretch my legs, I headed out for a brisk walk around the neighbourhood. Two minutes later I was back inside cursing the cold and wondering how people considered this to be normal for late April. For the life of me, I can't think of why else anyone in their right mind would survive a winter of endless snow and -20 weather and then think...."Hey, that was fun. Let's do that again."

Being thankful I was born last century, I switched the heat on and set the needle to 80 degrees for good measure. 'Better safe than sorry' I figured as I thought I'd see what was on the TV. Hockey. Click. Hockey again. Click. Hockey in French. I give up and leave it on the French channel. Thankfully, neither the hockey nor French is able to engage my brain and I finally drift off to sleep.

The next morning, the trade show got off to a late start. Precisely 14 hours after arriving, I opened the booth and made the final preparations. Sixty painful minutes ticked by and I shared some nervous jokes with the guys next to me.

"Who goes shopping in the morning anyways?" someone hollered out from a few booths down. The voice carries a proud Quebec accent which draws some responses in French. We all laughed even if we didn't understand. There wasn't much else to do anyways.

After two hours, I had talked to one person. Three hours in and the ratio had not improved. By four, the eerie quiet had turned into a steady hum of curiosity, whispers, bad jokes and worse story telling. Salesmen drift from booth to booth and do their best to do whatever it is salesmen do.

I did my best to look busy and avoid all those unnecessarily painful and awkward moments but this one rascal finally cornered me. I'd been doing pretty well to stay out of site but a misplaced glance caught his eye and the next thing I knew, he was headed right for me.

"How are you!?" he bellowed 50 decibels louder than necessary.

Several minutes of tepid conversation trickled by as we would share a few words and then nervously look around as if we expected the gold bearing horde to come crashing through the gates at any time. Finally, after convincing each other that our businesses were "actually doing quite well despite the recession", he wandered off to kill a few more painful minutes with some other unfortunate chap.

The above scenario played itself over and over again until I finally spied a fellow from a competitor. Recently, I'd done a bit of investigation into this particular company and had the lowdown on their company. Suffice it to say, they were not in good shape.

"Hey, hey!" he enthusiastically greeted me.

'This should be fun' I thought to myself as we exchanged courtesy conversation lines.

"How's business?" I asked with complete innocence.

"We're alright" he lied through his recently bleached teeth and I knew I had him. I told him we'd been affected by the recession but were still doing well. I didn't care if he knew I was lying as long as he thought he had me convinced.

He did and didn't waste any time reassuring me. This guy could talk and seemed to thoroughly enjoy the sound of his voice. At least one of us did. I let him go on because I figured if one of us was having fun, at least one of us was.

The conversation finally dragged itself to death and we were counting the times we could look out from our booth and not make eye contact. It was painfully slow. Yet, a light sorta clicked on in my head. Maybe this wasn't all for nothing.

I bid him adieu and watched him stroll down the aisle taking his time to look at each booth even though he'd already seen them a dozen times. Yeah, this trade show was bad - a far cry from the nearly celebratory affair held 7 months ago in Las Vegas.

But this was Sudbury - a famous city with a long, prosperous history of 125 years of mining history. A city built on an artesian spring of nickel that would never run dry. A city that, as of today, does not have a single mine in operation.

No money. Overstock. Unsure economy. All given as reasons but the news was still the same. All major mining operation in Sudbury would be indefinitely suspended. Something was definitely wrong and now everyone knew it.

The fear was here. A tangent, sticky fear that hung in the air like an invisible fog. It crept into our words and ideas and asked questions we didn't want to hear. Men whose careers and lives hung in the balance were being forced to think about things they never thought possible.

It was an ugly fear. The kind of fear that can only be brought about by men who find themselves too close to the ledge without an exit plan. Men who got bumped to the edges by an outside force far more powerful than them. Men who were not free.

Fishing for Dollars

2009-05-01T16:31:00.000-04:00

How to tell a nibble from a bite in the business world

Boring. Meandering. Wandering. Unsure. Unknown. These are all terms never used to describe successful business conversations. There's plenty more terms I could add to the list but let's stick to these for now.

For example, two weeks ago, I was manning my company's booth at a trade show. Things were creeping along and not showing any signs of picking up. After reshuffling the brochures for what must have been the hundredth time, I saw an older gentleman who was showing a disinterested curiousity in our equipment.

I headed over in his direction and started to strike up a conversation. My goal, of course, was to make some sales and make them as painlessly as possible. It's all a reluctant salesman could hope for and perhaps it works like that sometimes but today was not going to be one of those days.

After a couple minutes of small talk, I shifted into sales mode and started to ask more direct questions in hopes I'd get something concrete to go off of. However, it was obvious that this guy had attended his fair share of trade shows and was not going to be distracted from his other distraction - you know, the kind of distraction we all pretend to have when we don't really want to talk. After some further, fruitless attempts, I gave up and settled in for the indefinite chit-chat only to learn he was a retiree from the industry just "keeping an eye on things".

From long conversations with retirees to contract negotiations, I've come to notice something about what divides successful and unsuccessful businessmen - clear and simple communication.

Business, in a nutshell, is an extremely simple process - buy and sell. If only it were that easy. While business itself is easy, the people who get involved are not. They are what makes it all so unnessecarily complicated and confusing.

Ideas are nothing more than the same thought shared by two or more people. When you've got a basic idea like "buy and sell", you'd think it would be pretty well understood. For the most part, it is. Then again, it's not.

That's why clear communication with simple language is the best way to talk. It's crucial to say what is only necessary and timely. Don't get me wrong. There's plenty of time for the banter and the chit chat...as much as we all love it.

But if I may get down to brass tacks, all the talking we do isn't worth a used lollipop stick unless the core element of "buy and sell" is successfully shared by both sides. This only comes from clear communication on the basic idea behind it all - buying and selling each other's goods or services.

This is how to tell the real buyers and sellers from the rest who hang about in varying shades of murky entrepreneurship. Those who realize the entire relationship begins and ends with business take care of business first.

From the beginning, take care of business and business will take care of you. Avoid wasting your bait and time with the nibblers and wait for the bites. And just like we all learned when we were kids, you'll know when it's a bite.

Silly Lillies!

2009-03-02T11:24:00.001-05:00

Does a lilly remember yesterday? Does it fret over what has happened to it before? Does it worry about tomorrow? Does it wonder what could have been or what might have been or what could have happened or what might have happened if something else had happened? Does it wonder what is and what isn't? Does it psychoanalyze its existence? Does it wonder what its existence means? Does it hope its beautiful tomorrow? Does it make rules to avoid possible problems? Does it worry about how others see it?

“Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet…Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”

But we humans aren't lillies! How silly! They're just plants! Humans think! Humans have a brain! Humans have a mind! Humans have......Matthew 6:25 & Matthew 6:32-34.

Wealth and Riches

2009-03-01T00:16:00.001-05:00

America doesn't need more rich people. It needs more wealthy people - people with generational wealth. Rich people buy plasma TVs for their bathroom. Wealthy people buy long-term bonds. If the non-wealthy want to be wealthy, there has to a safe place where money can be invested with a guaranteed return.

Land and houses is the easiest and most preferred method by most average people like myself. Now that the real estate market has been skewered like Thanksgiving turkey, wealth has disappeared. This recession is about lost wealth and the ramifications of that.

The lost wealth is what allowed us to open more credit to purchase more but has been used against us by companies who have shipped their jobs overseas but haven't reduced their price as a result of the savings. They've eaten the extra profit. The problem is that small-business owners don't have the amount of capital available to keep up with the big boys and then get squeezed out in pricing and hiring wars.

What we might be seeing now is the global averaging of wages. Our American wealth, more specifically, the wealth created by higher American wage positions being made possible by offshore work, has increased on the backs of cheap labor. This also caused a faulty evaluation of property value for those who were given cheap credit and couldn't afford it when the time got rough. It's like the whole system was built during the high times of Clinton's last years under the assumption that the market wouldn't bomb again - an entire system built on the salary levels that have been falsely inflated due to cheap outsourcing. It's like no one realized that the Chinese (and others) might like to earn more than $200/month for 60-80 hour/weeks.

Now our property is moving back to it's correct value and America is losing wealth by the acre. This loss of wealth means loss of credit. Loss of credit means most people are unable to operate as before because most business operates on wealth capacity and not "rich" capacity. We need to return to a time when people spend the money they have and don't spend the money they don't have. The American dream was never given to anyone. It has always been earned and it's about time we move back to the financial principles that made our country strong.

It's amazing how FAIR trade with fair wages makes so much more sense than the swashbuckling, cut-throat form of business currently being done now.

basics of an ontological argument for God

2009-01-27T14:10:00.002-05:00

Good doesn't matter unless there is a better. Better doesn't matter unless there is a best. There would still be a state considered to be best for even if it is lowered from a previous level, it would be deemed the best for it would be the highest form of good we know.

To put it in geometrical terms, better is the tool humankind uses to judge good and evil as if it were directional with discernable points. To put it simply, solely recognizing the existence of better also recognized its ability as recognition of light's existence is also recognition of its ability.

Relativity further nails the point home as a being located farther down the spectrum will have a radically different view of small and large shifts along this line than a person who is centrally located. We normally call this culture, philosophy or psychology but regardless of the name, the ability for something to become better, and humankind's ability to recognize better, dares us to believe both of the following ideas: that no person has a complete understanding of good and evil and the pursuit of good, either through a dualist or deist view, is validated.

Looking at it from either way (or both ways), as all we undeniably finite beings must do, we can see there is an obvious difference between good and evil, characterized by whichever heroes and villains you want, which dares us to believe that good is better than evil and, in turn, whether you call it God or do not, exists, if not for the sake of something better, and once again dares us to believe that the state of perfection must exist.

Feudal Societies

2009-01-11T09:54:00.001-05:00

Basically, it's when certain people (kings and queens) own the land and the people living on the land have nothing to give to the king except work. The kings of different lands talk to each other because they control the land and this results in trade. Usually it mostly benefits the kings with the taxes and payments for trade going directly to the king. It limits the people of these feudal societies because they don't have the ability or access to trade on a large scale. Most importantly, they don't have the tools to equal the power and reach of the king. Most importantly, it means the king has power over the people.

Change land to money in the above scenario and that's the economic problem of the United States. We've been taken to the cleaners by financial kings and queens who grabbed up all the credit and all most of us can do is work for them. Our consumerism, and now inflation, has reduced privately held savings and put us in a position where we are wholly dependent on the kings to give us goods.

Now we have a choice to overthrow a bankrupt government (hardly likely) or pay for their mistakes. So we pay for their mistakes and then what? We need to use the tools available to us through the internet to overthrow the feudal society encamped in our financial and political realms. We need a government that doesn't spend what it doesn't have or give what it can't afford. Tax cuts don't do any good if the money is sent overseas. Savings don't do any good if you don't spend them. We will all always be consumers but that does not mean we all need to be demanders.

You don't need a Wii. You don't need a Louis Vuitton bag. You probably don't need a new car. You most likely don't need a new house. Start saving or invest in government bonds. If you don't help reduce current debt, you're passing on a greater debt burden to future generations. Our children and grandchildren will be paying off our current debts. If that's not taxation without representation on the greatest scale yet seen by humans, I don't know what is. If that's not one of the main reasons our forefathers revolted against England in the first place, I guess I need to go back to history class.

We're like a bunch of greedy peasants receiving free gifts from the king who has used our land as collateral for a loan. Now he can't make payments and we the peasants have nothing to give even if we do trust them to bring us back to financial health. Yeah, we've been sold but neither have we saved or prepared for this occasion. Our future has been mortgaged but it's not in the hands of other Americans. Guess what'll happen when China or others call in their debts or decide our overvalued currency isn't worth the paper its printed on? Now either invest the $10,000 stuffed in your mattress into America or else grab onto your seats because the government is about to take us on a wild ride. After all, besides the overpriced, namebrand Chinese-made seat that we're holding onto, the government's all we got and it's our fault for making it that way.

We were able to enjoy life without saving anything for the future. Now the future is coming up fast, it's got a head start and "We The People" are once again under the control of the kings. How did this happen? We voted with our wallets on a daily basis.

-- When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic. Benjamin Franklin