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26 July 2010We Are One Family a personal family history take on the unity of mankind. YouTube are continuing to uphold the strike against my video Islam is Not a Race, but they have not given one word of explanation as to why. Something in that video offends one of their rules, but what, and how? No explanations are offered. I now have over a thousand subscribers on YouTube, the 1000 mark was passed on 22nd July, my 21st wedding anniversary and my wife's graduation day. I have been neglecting the website for several weeks. It is time to sort this out. I will be adding more links to more recent YouTube material soon and I will try to keep the website up to date. 27 June 2010Bollocks. 1 June 2010Busy with YouTube releted stuff. Minor tweaks. 30 April 2010Open Letter to the Chief Rabbi - Can I Have My Foreskin Back?By Eric Alexander. 07 April 2010I deleted a page out of respect for the subject's wish to step out of the public glare. 25 March 2010 24 March 2010The YouTube campaign is going well. 464 subscribers and plenty more material to come (scripts almost ready).
22 March 2010More material added to No, I will not keep silent about Islam New video, complete with script. 17 March 2010No, I will not keep silent about Islam
No, I will not keep silent about Islam (MP3) (4.75 MB, mono, high quality) 6 March 2010Islam in NOT a RaceWhat sort of God do they Worship? by Eric Alexander.
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Dear Member:This is to notify you that we have removed or disabled access to the following material as a result of a third-party notification by Michael Rippie ,The Last Church claiming that this material is infringing: Church of Ultimate Naked Truth: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WehX3GEOxRI Please Note: Repeated incidents of copyright infringement will result in the deletion of your account and all videos uploaded to that account. In order to prevent this from happening, please delete any videos to which you do not own the rights and refrain from uploading additional videos that infringe on the copyrights of others. For more information about YouTube's copyright policy, please read the Copyright Tips guide. If you elect to send us a counter notice, please go to our Help Centre to access the instructions. Please note that under Section 512(f) of the Copyright Act, any person who knowingly materially misrepresents that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification may be subject to liability. Sincerely, |
This from a man who claims a copyright to some misheard lyrics of The Sound of Music, claims to have been brought back from the dead by God, claims the power of levitation and psychic travelling and has attempted to solicit donations by pretending to have built a school in Tanzania. You're not worth my time Rippie. The video is better without you.
Dream Your Way to Enlightenment a look at what dreams can and cannot do.
The Art of Debate a look at the art of debate, especially in relation to debate on Usenet newsgroups and similarly polarized debate forums.
Atheist Names have we put up with religiously distinctive names for too long?
Sacrifice what do you give the being who made everything and where would he put it?
The World English Foundation: no one dialect of English gets it right all the time, perhaps we need somebody to kick some arse and sort things out.
FAQ a page of frequently asked questions, please avoid asking the same old stuff all the time, it gets very tedious.
A substantial increase (more than 100% extra free) in The Future Doesn't Suck.
Freedom's Good: YouTube video response explaining why liberal atheists don't threaten religion.
New Man: progress on the New Man front has been set back substantially by having to go to work. However I have another holiday and I'm planning to get back on track again.
Fitna, Geert Wilders and the Death of European Freedom
Atheist Hell: who would an atheist send to Hell?
Some more minor tweaks.
The Great Prophet. At last the bait is working again. (Updated hours later)
A little more material on Lebanese Atheist.
God is an Elixir a response to God is a Drug
Who Wants Heaven a response to Heaven is Hell
More tweaks to the main page, condensing things further.
Tweaks to the main page, search page and a few minor tweaks here and there. Also the whole site changed so that links previously labelled Debate have now become Forum. Please let me know if this search and replace operation has caused any unexpected errors. My thought is that there may be some people out there who may not associate the word Debate with a debate forum and might have ignored the links.
Lebanese Atheist Ali, an atheist from Lebanon asks me about determinism, free will and the meaning of life.
Have we got a recession going on? I took delivery of a Business Pages directory today, it was 50 pages less than the previous year's version but a seemingly identical layout.
The Jewish Question (and footnote page the Blood Libel) Sometimes you just have to get your hands dirty and tackle the big issues that make everybody hysterical and want to kill you. Or is that just me?
Empires of the Future: were empires so bad? Is there any chance of a new age of empires?
I've restored Sex Education to its former glory.
So Obama has had two inaugurations, one that might not have counted and one that did. One when he swore on Lincoln's Bible and said “so help me God” and one when he didn't, because he shouldn't have said it and no Bible is required for the oath. Maybe one day a president will have the balls to do it properly. This stupid magical symbolism of swearing on the Bible is a farce. That book is full of deception and lies. I know, I've read it.
I have decided to have a go at imposing a house style on my writing to give more consistency. Free Find's A to Z index facility will enable me to find spelling mistakes and it will give me the opportunity to purge them with Dreamweaver's global find and replace tools. Using the full power of Dreamweaver is now much less fraught with anxiety now I have four times as much RAM as I had before. I have decided to use Wikipedia and Ask Oxford as my main guides. The decision was prompted by seeing that Wikipedia uses antisemitism rather than anti-Semitism as its preferred version, which is just so much neater, hyphenated words with capital letters partway through look ugly and are clunky to type. I have a natural almost Germanic satisfaction in shoving words together to form compounds when the ingredients that make up a word really do produce something which is greater or more precise than the sum of its parts. Antisemitism is not the opposite of Semitism because there isn't really any such thing as Semitism but antisemitism is real. Semite and Semitic are proper words but Semitism is really just a backformation from antisemitism, while we can deduce what it means it doesn't really refer to anything concrete that wouldn't be better (more precisely and less ambiguously) referred to in relation to Israel, Judaism, Zionism, Jewish ethnicity, the Jewish people or Semitic languages.
In the coming weeks I will be continuing the clean-up of the site, stripping away clutter and stuff that looks like advertisements and replacing it with decent upstanding text links to sites or at least pages that I thoroughly approve of.
The site has lost its way to some degree and is not getting the visitor numbers it used to get. The purpose of the site is to change minds, some only need a small change, some need more substantial changes.
Of course I'm not sure I'm right about everything. There are some matters that I know I am very unclear on and in the next few years my mind is likely to change as much as it has done in this latest decade of debate. I want to make sure my meme machine is well maintained for the second decade of debate.
In the last few years my mind has changed on a number of issues. First of all I no longer describe myself as a strong atheist, I don't know that there are no gods. I am working on the assumption that there probably aren't. In the unlikely event that new convincing evidence comes along I may change my mind. But it would have to be new evidence, not a reconsideration of the old evidence because I have been tossing this stuff about for years now and it isn't convincing. The more I research the subject the less likely I am to accept any conventional religious position.
My political views have changed too. I no longer think of myself as a socialist at all. I think that common ownership is an option, not the only option, the preferred option or the destiny of mankind. Sometimes common ownership by producers works, sometimes common ownership by users works, sometimes common ownership by everybody in a particular vicinity works. Many times private ownership works better. I am a utilitarian and pragmatic liberal.
I don't believe that capitalism is the default position for economic activity. Modern capitalism has evolved because of the way the framework of laws has developed. In a society with more or less corruption the system would be different. In a society with different laws the system would be different.
I don't believe that races exist the way nineteenth century biologists described them. Neither do I believe that every human population is entirely identical in all politically sensitive measures such as intelligence, propensity toward promiscuity, initiative, drive and penis size and yet is allowed to be free to vary on those measures which are undeniable such as skin colour or those deemed to be trivial such as stature, amount of body hair, breast size and shape and forms of lips and eyelids. I don't expect reality to be that convenient. The fundamental reality is that people are people and the way to find a smart hard working person is not to look at the colour of their hair, skin and eyes but to look at them as individuals. In this last decade I have come to the conclusion that at least 90% of the explanation for why certain countries are rich and other ones are poor is explained by long term trends of geography, history and biology that have nothing to do with human differences. But I have never been of the opinion that providing a convincing explanation of something proves that there couldn't possibly be anything in any alternative explanation. Many things in life are explained by multiple explanations, you can't win the F1 World Championship in a second rate car no matter how hot your driver is. I believe there is enough explanatory power in geography and long history without needing to rely on any differences between races, tribes, clines or whatever else gives you fewest palpitations but that does not prove that all people are equal. People don't have to be equal for it to be right to treat everybody fairly. Equality of opportunity is an ethical stance, not a response to the latest data. There is no data that would frighten me, unlike those who maintain that races can't exist and everybody just has to be equal. They are the people who are afraid of research because of the possibility of truth not being quite as convenient as they would like. They can't handle the truth. I can. Whatever it may be.
I love my little baby Logitech cordless notebook mouse and my Aspire One, they make a great combination. I have just found out an unexpected feature of this combination, not only did they not require any setting up but it just works, stick the USB stick in and it instantly responds to the cordless mouse which is switched on automatically and just as great pulling the stick out and sticking it in the slot on the back of the mouse switches it off. There's none of that tedious rebooting required or anything to click before it can safely be ejected you just plug it in when you need it and take it out again when you don't. I can pull out the power lead, pull out the mouse's USB stick, pocket the mouse and close the case on the netbook which automatically goes into a low energy hibernate mode. I can then slip the netbook into a drawer or my case and I'm ready for action in about the same time it would take to fold up a copy of The Guardian. Reversing the process works just as smoothly, and I just had to prove it to myself, it takes ten seconds for the netbook to come back to life exactly as it was before. It just gets better and better.
President Obama. That has a nice ring to it. The end of eight wasted years of incompetence, cronyism and corruption. This world needs some leadership and it certainly wasn't getting the right sort from George W Bush.
I filled up with tears several times thinking about the significance of these events and I probably haven't finished yet. One moment that got me was on the radio, a woman who had been part of the civil rights movement was being interviewed and the interviewer had finished and was trying to move on to the next point with a cheery comment about about people from all over world coming to be there. He said that there were people who had come a long way to be there. “A mighty long way” she said. That was it, I was off again.
I've made the email page significantly more inviting. Email feeds this site. I need interaction to develop my arguments, discouraging emails was madness.
Clearly Afraid a page stimulated by email, stimulated in the same sort of way an oyster grows a pearl. Debbie provides a tiny piece of grit and I do the rest.
I have been exploring the facilities offered by Free Find, which has been spidering my site for years. It offers this:
What's New / Changed a page which shows all the pages that have been edited since the last pass of the spider. This week it will be almost every page, later it will become a bit more useful for the regular visitor.
It also has Full A to Z Index which again does exactly what it says on the tin, a full index based on every word in the site, in alphabetical order, updated every week.
And there's Site Map which creates a map of the site, as you would have probably guessed. And Advanced Search for quick access to advanced searching features, e.g. you can find the 19 pages that contain bollocks but not bullshit. There are 27 pages of bollocks, only 19 are pure bollocks, that's good to know. But 81 pages of bullshit is a bit worrying.
I have reversed some previous moves toward self-censorship with the help of my archives. If I can't use this site to express what I think there is no point in it existing at all. I'm taking back the site. I'm taking a firm grip on the editorial policy myself and I've stopped looking over my shoulder all the time to ask myself what other people think about it. Other people can have their own sites. This one's mine and I make the rules. Bollocks to censorship, including self-censorship. "If the human body's obscene, complain to the manufacturer, not me."Larry Flynt |
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A thorough upgrading and spring cleaning has begun. Phase one is now complete. I have lost my way, I will be getting back into doing what this site does best, I will be debating with the world and telling the rest of humanity where they are going wrong. The site will be busy, there will be a refocusing on the essentials.
Feminism is a Bitch by Jenni.
Revision of The Race Issue. You live and learn or you just waste your time.
Happy New Year. There will be more new material soon.
The latest news on the hardware front is my upgrading of my desktop PC from 512 MB up to 2 GB. This should make a substantial difference to the performance especially as I haven't upgraded to a more memory hungry operating system or splashed out on any new behemoth of a program. I will just be doing the same stuff, better. In the earlier configuration there were clearly times that the machine was struggling to cope with some of the tasks I had been setting it. It became a bit temperamental when editing videos and when called upon to have three browsers, a paint program, Windows Explorer, Picasa and Dreamweaver with over a hundred pages open all at the same time. It could handle all of that, just not very well. Now it will have four times as much RAM and much more spare RAM if you take into consideration the fixed costs of the operating system and graphics (64 MB of the main memory). I have not experienced much in the way of a general speed up but I am not expecting that, it will need to load just as much stuff into memory as before, the difference is it will not need to keep swapping data in and out of memory so much.
So far the only speed increase I have noticed for certain is that it is more stable and switches off faster, which might not seem very important to those who focus only on doing things on the computer but actually the ability to switch the computer off cleanly and efficiently whilst saving all files and settings that you want saved is very helpful. The faster I can come away from the computer the less sarcastic my wife is. That's a major plus I wasn't expecting.
RAM News. Oh yes. It does the business. I've just updated every page on my site with dozens of pages open, lots of tabs open in Opera, Open Office Writer, Notepad and a full virus scan going on all at the same time and it took it in its stride. I think I would have to really try hard to go out of my way to stress it now. I'm happy.
My son has a Vista laptop with 3 GB of RAM and 250 GB hard drive and takes video editing for granted. My first computer was a greenscreen Amstrad CPC464 which loaded programs via a cassette tape. One thing it did really well was word processing. It could also do simple platform games, but only one thing at a time. Of course there were earlier devices out there that did even less, my brother-in-law had a computer before then but it did so little that I wasn't interested. While I was at school I never saw any computers at all and at that time computers as a hobby was so rare I don't even think we had developed any disparaging terms to label those who were interested in them.
I became aware of the internet as a phenomenon sometime in the late 1980s, my brother-in-law spoke about somebody who was getting involved with computers and communicating and it was an exciting new thing. A couple of years later it was beginning to be picked up by the media. My first exposure to the internet came when I bought a modem to allow me to receive and send faxes on the cheap. I had a computer for word processing and desktop publishing purposes and so a greyscale hand scanner had already been purchased, the 14,400 modem turned the set-up into a fax machine. It also came with a demonstration disk for Compuserve. I could not relax and surf, the thought of bills for connection time mounting up preyed too heavily on my mind. It was a few years later still when I got my hands on a second hand Pentium PC with 48 MB of RAM (from my brother-in-law, who was always encouraging me to get involved with computers) that I became hooked on the internet.
This was 1999. There had been more and more talk on the media about the internet and I became clear in my mind that this was something I wanted to get involved in. Not as a consumer but as a producer of content. I didn't want to play on the internet I wanted to be a player. It was almost as if my life up until that time was a rehearsal for this. I had learned from my days in student politics about how to do desktop publishing, cut and paste and all of that. Not a computer in sight. This was analogue desktop publishing using dry transfer lettering, craft knives, glue, photocopiers and spirit duplicators. I really enjoyed it. I also became involved in CB radio using it just like proper amateur radio but without all the tedium of passing any tests. 11 metre SSB radio was great fun, illegal of course but great fun. I really enjoyed making contact with people around the world and around the British Isles and liked the idea that these were people I could talk with because of the shared interest in radio. Before I was involved in student politics I had formed my own political party in order to advance my own views, this was while I was still at school. Now here was something new, the internet, my own website, in which I could get satisfaction for these different aspects of my personality. I could do publishing, I could organize supporters, I could lead opinion, I could play with barely understood technology and buy new toys, I could contact people around the world and collect contacts like stamps. It is hardly surprising that I took to the internet in the way I did once the spectre of huge bills had gone away.
I knew when the cable was laid that this is something I was going to use. The television and the telephone was just a small part of the picture. What mattered was the fibre optic cable's capacity to send data, in both directions, in huge volumes. We hooked up to the cable as soon as it was available, this was before there was a serious possibility of getting online myself, I was preparing for the inevitable future. Three changes of business name (Nynex to Cable and Wireless to ntl to Virgin media) and it's still my lifeline, my precious link to the internet. I wouldn't want to face the future without it. The next development on the horizon is 50 megabit fibre optic broadband. I am not sure how useful that speed will be to me, I don't currently have many speed issues because I don't do a lot of multimedia work and I don't download films. I have never paid just for the internet to go faster. I upgraded my 14400 modem to a 28800 by giving away the 14400 with a computer I sold as I had then started renting a better one complete with faster modem. The 28800 went back with the rented computer, when I bought again obviously I bought the fastest then available. I changed from dial-up at 56 kb to “broadband” at 128 kb mostly for the always-on convenience rather than for a speed boost. Since then all the speed boosts have been free automatic upgrades. I await to see what price they are looking to charge for the super fast broadband when it arrives.
My baby laptop is again becoming useful as I have more opportunities to use it. I will be able to write more.
The new man was born of two weeks on holiday. I need to get him back as I have slipped back into my old ways too readily now I have gone back to work. This year I really will have to make a point of getting all the holiday I am entitled to, I am a much nicer person when I'm not working.
Naturally over Christmas there has been more alcohol about and I have drunk it. I have also got back into the habit of drinking to make up for having more stress and less time off. This is a bad idea. While drink can help relax you for a few hours, it is an effective social lubricant, it is not an effective substitute for relaxation. So I am redoubling my efforts to focus on keeping my alcohol consumption down.
I am surrounded by fragmenting marriages, both my immediate neighbours moved in as young couples with children and now both fathers have moved out. This makes me realize how lucky I am.
Merry Atheist Christmas everybody.
I'll be a bit tied up in work in the coming weeks so I'm not sure if I will have much new material to contribute. I'm not giving up, not by any means, but late December and early January are always times when I get too little time off to write much. I'm not likely to be running out of opinions any time soon. Have a great time, feel free to enjoy yourself, the Christians don't own December!
I Hate Pink (YouTube video) based on the page I Hate Pink.
New YouTube video, Night Terrors and the invention of Hells, based on Hell is War.
Acer Aspire One: a user review.
The Wall More ranting.
Doing it for your Community: why you really should have children. Yes I mean you.
Obama's Brave New World The world will never be quite the same again.
I'm a new man. I have decided to pull myself together and arrest the slide that has been going for several years. I wasn't liking the person I was becoming so I decided to become the person I would rather be.
I started by tidying up my office and cleaning it. I don't do this anything like often enough so the place becomes disgusting quite quickly. The nature of the space that it is, an improvised small room partitioned off within my garage (do you know anybody who keeps a car in a garage?) means that my wife does not class it as part of the house and so she leaves it alone. I wouldn't expect her to tidy it, but the problem has been that she didn't expect me to tidy it either so it wasn't tidied, literally for months on end. It is never going to be a thoroughly smart space because I can't afford the time or money to get it decorated and kitted out like a proper home office. The office is little more than a door, a shower room was built inside the garage and its walls created and defined a space beyond, adding a door made this space into a windowless room, adding a light fitting and a second hand office desk and a chair made it into an office. Adding a phone line and my computer made it into the nerve centre and command bunker of mwillett.org. The phone line was later replaced by a wired connection to the cable box. Later still a wireless router allowed access from every room in the house, the garden and a little way beyond.
With a tidier and cleaner space to spend time in the next step was to cut down on my drinking. I have never had a drink problem in the sense of being dependent upon it or of drinking huge quantities or of being obnoxious when I was drunk. I simply drank a little too much sometimes and too often. I have not given up drinking but I have stopped buying drink to drink alone at home on a regular basis, which I suppose amounts to the same sort of thing but without quite the same sense of self denial. I can still drink, I can still get drunk, I can still buy drink to drink on my own I just haven't done so for a couple of weeks and I don't intend to change that.
The next step was to change the way I eat. It is probably best to avoid the phrase going on a diet because I am not looking to exclude anything, just to change my habits into something more appropriate. You could say I was not overweight just that I was not tall enough for my weight. It wasn't that I ate too much more that for my food intake I should have been working as hard as my farmer grandparents. This is pretty much the definition of the current obesity problem across the world, our physical effort is being done by other people and by machines but our bodies still crave the same protein, sugar and fat levels that our ancestors craved and in many cases could not get hold of. My appetite for food did not match my appetite for physical effort. As I have no intention of getting a job as a lumberjack or taking up any kind of sport it is obvious that the way to square the circle between what I eat and the amount I exercise had to be addressed mainly from the food side of the equation and that must mean less food in total and fewer calories. As fat is the most calorie dense food available cutting down fat in my diet seems an obvious strategy to go for. Cutting out fat altogether is not an option as this would spoil the taste of many foods and so make the change too painful. The idea of never eating fried chicken again is not appealing, moderation is the key, nothing can be off limits all together because I will not be able to maintain that regime. I am not looking to go on a crash diet to lose weight rapidly because that will almost certainly be counter productive in the long term. It took me years to put on the weight so it is not sensible to expect to shed it all in weeks.
Eating what I felt like eating got me into this mess so I can't expect to be able to get out of it the same way. I have to be more disciplined and deny myself some of my urges. The trick is to manage to deny just enough to have the desired effect without causing me to have a backlash. The downside of the moderate approach is that progress will be slow. I will have to find ways to look for the bright side. Fortunately I have already noticed improvements in the way I look and the way I feel. I can now clearly see both my ears when I look straight into a mirror. When I am having a shave I am more aware of my jawbone. I have more energy and my mood is better, my highs are higher and my lows are more shallow. I haven't had anybody else notice the change in my appearance yet but I expect that will come soon.
The final push for this change came from the responses I have been getting from my YouTube videos. Of course nobody who took my views seriously was calling me fat but wasn't that the point? Some people were not paying any attention to me at all because they had the handy excuse of looking at my appearance and making a negative judgement about me on that basis. This response was particularly strong from young American men who seem to have bought into the idea of American supremacy and white supremacy built on a toxic mix of supporting the US military and despising any form of weakness whether in their towel-headed enemies or in their fellow citizens who they had been encouraged to view as parasites. To these short haired steroid-abusing anti-intellectuals I represent several of the things they have been encouraged to despise and mock.
I offend these people's concept of decency because:
1 ] I am a European pussy. Anybody who isn't American is obviously scum, too cowardly to have had the courage to be born American. You might think that where you are born is not a thing you can control but to these people that isn't so, not being born American is a clear demonstration of moral failing. If this wasn't the case then surely they would have no good reason to be so proud of their own choice of birthplace and the positive warm glow they believe should surround them at all times because of the mark of moral superiority this prenatal choice of theirs confers on them.
2 ] I am too clever by half. The superiority of Americans and the white race is inherent and self-evident, being seen to be smart is seen as bad taste and boastful. These are people for whom Biff Tannen and George W Bush are role model. Muscles and guns rule, geeks are not to be trusted and while blacks and Hispanics are too dumb to run their own continents Jews and Asians are too smart and need to be shown who is best. The best are clearly the young and moderately stupid people like them from a large country which makes up for its own educational deficiencies by sucking in smart people from across the world to do their thinking for them.
3 ] I'm English and I'm clearly doing it deliberately just to annoy them personally.
4 ] I am a liberal, which is apparently now a bad thing and a synonym for socialist. My plan is clearly to make all the rich people poor and put lazy black people in mansions at public expense. Any move which would increase the taxes of people who earn substantially more than they will ever earn is clearly wrong-headed, communist, unworkable and also somehow against their interests in ways they see no good reason why they ever have to justify or explain to anybody or even understand themselves. All those communists were Jews weren't they? Enough said.
5 ] I'm a Satan-loving atheist who spits on Jesus.
6 ] I'm fat, which clearly demonstrates my moral deficiencies because I am not in condition to undertake a forced march carrying an M16 I am therefore inviting a foreign invasion of Britain and America and obviously if their sister gets raped by an Arab it will be my fault for being fat and I should be ashamed.
I don't suppose that losing a bit of weight will have much of an effect on those who are diametrically opposed to my ways of thinking but I don't see why I should make it easy for people to dismiss my views. I have noticed on YouTube that an attractive face and an easy talking style have a big impact and that people who don't really have much to say can make a big impact if they look nice when they say it. I suppose my aim in future is to be neither fat nor fatuous.
Update
I took two nights off from my new New Man regime to celebrate the election of Barack Obama and I am feeling rough this morning, which has convinced me that I had been doing the right thing. I like the feeling of being pleasantly drunk but I hate the feeling of being a man who drinks and after being free of drinking alcohol for nearly a whole month I do now know the way I should be feeling. Compared to the way I was feeling earlier in the week I now feel heavy, listless and slow. I noticed I was sweaty in bed again, my wife had put the drier feel down to the colder nights but now I know that I was right when I said it was my self-indulgent lifestyle that was mostly to blame. So this morning I have had porridge for breakfast again, a much healthier start to the day. I will take the last 600 ml bottle of strong cider out of the fridge because I don't plan on drinking it any time soon. I may end up using it in cooking, the same as the dregs of the big flagon of scrumpy I didn't quite drain last night. It will make a nice base for the gravy to go with the roast pork for Sunday lunch.
I met up with my father yesterday and that put things into perspective for me. He has always led an active lifestyle compared to me and I have never seen him drink enough alcohol to make him too drunk to drive. He would have a bottle of red wine, for medicinal reasons, and it would last him the best part of a week. In contrast I would be getting too drunk to drive four or five times per week. While we obviously share a lot of genes which is clear in the fact that we are both the same height, six foot two, and we look very similar I think my lifestyle is leading me astray. My father could easily pass for a man twenty years younger, I suspect he's got fewer grey hairs than I've got and his hairline has retreated no further than my own has. I too have a face which is quite youthful, in my job I often have to ask people for their date of birth and I am often surprised that people who I think are older than me turn out to be younger. I have the genes to look young for my age, but I now clearly recognize that living to a healthy old age retaining a sharp mind and a comparatively youthful appearance is neither automatic nor out of the question. It's there for the taking, and I want it. If my mind is as sharp as those of my parents when I am their age I will be content. Keeping that mental sharpness requires me to take better care of myself.
Update
The gravy was delicious and now there is no more alcohol in the house and no plans to buy any. I have decided that drinking wasn't doing very much for me, it certainly wasn't helping my creativity or anything like that. I didn't write much when I was drunk and when I did it was not very good. My most creative writing has always been done in the morning, and if I think about it clearly it is more likely that my best work has followed nights when I wasn't drinking. My brain is at its best early in the day, especially if stimulated by modest exercise, a bit of brisk walking to get the blood flowing. Hangovers and drunkenness don't do anything to improve my creativity and I suspect that most people who are creative and drink are creative despite the drink rather than because of it. Is the association that drink is often the curse of the creative mind? I find my creativity comes and goes and it is not predictable. Sometimes I can sit down and write freely and originally and at other times I just don't have anything to write and so I content myself with editing or other similarly less creative enterprises. Or I drink. Sometimes both. Drastically reducing my drinking should not have any negative consequences for my creativity.
The Defence of Liberty. Freedom will not defend itself and it has no magic powers.
The Mob, the Mask and the Masquerade a look at anonymity and openness in political activity.
The classic small cheap portable computer. Microsoft free! Simple and effective as a second computer but unlikely to be best choice for anybody as an only computer. I love it.
I've been busy on other matters. The new material will come.
I'm now on Facebook.
Animals: Give and Take a look at animal rights and how we should treat them.
NEW TOY. Watch out tomorrow for full details of my new toy plus several new pages that are in the pipeline (written but not yet made up into pages).
Watch this video, it's amazing, it has changed my mind on the issue of spirituality:
Your debates are wonderfully insightful, witty and blunt. I loved the large spectrum of issues you discuss and it entertained me for hours at work. Thanks for speaking your mind and bringing awareness to issues most people are too afraid to talk about. Sparking discussion is the only way for us to learn, grow and become more mindful, accepting people. I especially enjoyed "In Praise of Big Women," "I Hate Pink" and "Virgin on the Ridiculous," being a sex-loving, pink- hating, curvy woman myself. I cant wait to read more. You rock Martin. Sincerely, Emily Peet-Lukes |
Tweaks to many pages. Major changes to The Right to Bare Arms.
New page Suicide Attempts in Perspective.
New page 500 Characters, Page 2, quite small at the moment.
New Page
500 Characters YouTube comments, mixed subjects.
I have decided to turn over several new leaves today.
I have tidied my office. I can see the floor now.
I have decided to make this page significantly more like a blog and allow it to become richer in graphical and multimedia content as well as keep abreast of my other online activity such as email, YouTube and the like.
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Good day, My name is larry opoku i am with the Continental Church International and i will to order the Reflective Traffic Cones Height 28 Inches Base 14 1/2 x 14 1/2 Inches Quantity:300PCs.kindly email me with a total pickup price of 300PCs.I will like you to send me an email response with the picked up price for this sizes and if you don't have this size or type available kindly email me with the sizes you have available. I will like to know your forms or terms of payment you accept Kindly respond to me as soon as possible for us to proceed further with the order. Thank You. larry opoku. |
What do I do to encourage email like this?Should I stop? |
In reguard to your so called "How
to win the lottery" article... I read it and I think it's total bullshit! There is nothing in this world that can make you a millionair over night with the techniques you have listed about the lottery, the lottery is at random or is it? I can prove one thing the lottery numbers are not picked the same night they tell people they are picking them, they always pick the lottery numbers the same night they draw for the previous game of luck, it's really easy and common sense to pick your numbers on the same night they announce the new game, I will be honest I have yet tried playing, I have been researching the lottery for many years and recently learned and experience something no one would think twice about.... I cant talk for the uk never played uk lottery however I have played USA lottery and won several small amounts, however not nothing big... ok moving on to this experience, the usa lottery is suspose to be picked Saturday nights at 10 p.m keyword SUSPOSE TO BE then the numbers are published in Sundays newspaper... Well one Saturday morning at 7 am on my way to work i decided to stop at this small market to get a Saturday newspaper well while I was there I so happened to got out the door and noticed one thing that was a total shock! I have picked up SUNDAYS newspaper! Yes Sundays! the next days paper it had tomorrows date on it I ran back in and asked the clerk if I was seeing things he said NO they give us Sundays paper to us on Saturday morning, I said ok... so I got looking and guess what was in the paper? the lottery winning numbers for Saturday's pick at 10 p.m! I had those numbers at 7 am! Now explain to me your patterns in winning the lottery? Wanna know mine BUY YOUR TICKET AFTER THE PREVIOUS GAME HAS ENDED AND THERE IS NO WINNER! example game ends Wednesday night at 10 pm buy those ticket THURSDAY ONLY!!! Because on any other day after that your money is going into the next jackpot round! your odds of winning will be greater!!! |
I beg to differ. The only way you can win the lottery is by picking the numbers that are drawn, I'll stand by that 100%.
The picking of lottery numbers is not connected with any events outside the mechanical (or electronic) device that selects them. The balls don't know they are balls and they don't know they represent numbers in the lottery. They don't know about the other balls. They don't know your anniversary or what age your cat was when he died or why anybody picks whatever numbers they pick. They don't know what numbers came up last week and they don't know or care when the last ticket was sold or how much money is in the prize fund. They don't know about the locations of stars and planets either now or at the time of your birth. A (properly run and fair) lottery draw is an event that is unconnected to any external event including and especially the sales of lottery tickets. The only way you can win a share of a lottery jackpot is to own a ticket with numbers that correspond to the numbers drawn. No ifs or buts.
It does not matter when the lottery is actually drawn as long as the last sale of a ticket is before this time. If American Sunday newspapers go to print with the results of the lottery draw in them while tickets are still on sale there wouldn't be another print run as all the printers would be sharing the jackpot. This is assuming players get to select which numbers they buy. If they can't select the numbers then the situation is little different to a regular lottery ticket purchase but the random event that determines whether you win is done in the lottery ticket machine rather than on stage next to a woman in a glittery backless costume.
It is quite common for the first editions of newspapers to hit the street the night before the date printed on their cover. In Britain you can usually get a first edition of tomorrow's newspaper around 11pm if you know where to go in a big city.
A well-run lottery should have a provably live draw to minimize conspiracy theories. In Britain the national lottery has been broadcast live on television since it started, it's dull television but it helps convince people that there is no funny-business going on.
Why on earth would it matter when you bought your tickets? You have exactly the same odds of matching up with any future draw, the ticket you buy has exactly the same (very slim) chance of matching up with the draw it is entered for as it does for the draw next week or one in July 2017. Nothing that you can do can influence the odds of that particular set of numbers matching up. Nothing. The only way to increase your chances of winning is to buy more tickets with different numbers on them. You can of course buy more tickets with the same numbers on them, something which does not increase your chances of winning a prize but can mean you win more of the money that is allocated to whatever level of success you manage e.g. if three tickets match the jackpot numbers you will one third of the jackpot if you own one ticket with those numbers on but if you owned two such tickets you would win two of those thirds of the jackpot. Buying that second ticket with the same numbers is not stupid assuming that you “know” which numbers will come up. Anybody who believes that positive thinking will effect the chaotic (in the mathematical sense) behaviour of balls bouncing around inside a machine some time in the future would be a bit of a hypocrite if they bought anything other than a large number of identical tickets, enough to ensure that they minimized the share of the jackpot won by players who just happened to pick the right numbers by random chance. Come on, what have they done to deserve to win, huh?
--
Martin Willett
http://mwillett.org/
kmailzone wrote:
Jesus is Lord.
Prove it.
(No reply)
Barrister Daniel Wilson wrote: DANIEL WILSON'S LAW CHAMBERS LEGAL PRACTITIONERS AND PRIVATE LAWYER 6 NOEL STREET LONDON, W1F 8GJ UNITED KINGDOM PHONE: +44-702-407-7209 LATE MR. FRANK TERRY'S PHILANTHROPIC ESTATE Beneficiary, My name is Mr. Daniel Wilson; I am a native of England, and president in the Chambers Daniel Wilson's Law Chambers here in London, United Kingdom. I am a legal practitioner, called to the U.K Bar in 1980.I used to be the personal Attorney to late Mr. Frank Terry. Mr. Frank Terry was a great philanthropist before death; before he died, he made a philanthropic will of Five Million Dollars (US$5,000,000.00)which was meant to be donated to charity organizations in Africa to support African children living with HIV/AIDS.We conducted an electronic email random draw in our chambers today, and your email address was picked as the beneficiary to this philanthropic fund of $5m. It is our great desire to claim this fund so that it can be used for the purpose for which it is meant, because the bank where the money is currently deposited has instructed that we produce the beneficiary of this fund within 14 days else the money will be confiscated to the Government's treasury as unclaimed funds. You have to get back to me immediately so that we can begin the process of transferring the fund into any of your designated bank accounts. As soon as I receive your reply message I shall give you further information on the process. With your full co-operation, this transaction shall be concluded within 7 days, and after the funds have been transferred into your account, you shall keep 50% of the money ($2.5m) to yourself as the beneficiary, donate 40% to any Charity Organization of your choice, while the balance of 10% comes to me as your attorney in this transaction. Also, this transaction is highly confidential and should remain as such until the funds must have been transferred into your account, so do not discuss this transaction with ANYBODY. I wait to hear back from you immediately, so that I can give you all the necessary information needed to proceed, and don't forget to include your name,location and phone numbers in your response. Congratulations once again. Barrister Daniel Wilson. |
Do you have a good reason for not using my name and telling me you're from England as if I am not? Also why is this email encoded in Cyrillic? Why are the sums quoted in US dollars? Why is your postcode that of a youth hostel in Soho? Also why is it considered important to give this money away to a stranger rather than give the money to charity or let it be spent on the priorities decided by the elected government of my, but probably not your, country?
And finally why does the entire text of your letter look so similar to the one that appears here?
Your reply is awaited.
Your friend,
Benny Fishery
Tweaks to Treehuggers, a new Tree Hugger.
An update on Technical Details, about my video making.
© 1999 - 2010 by Martin Willett. |
mwillett.org: Debate Unlimited |
