The Bish

I just received a phone call from an obscure unknown number. I declined to answer. Shortly after, my phone buzzed and beep. New voicemail.

It was debt collectors … trying to collect … debt.

I’m all like, “what the f mate, I don’t owe shit to no one!” (except grandma)

I call them back, I say, “wat up?”

31OCT2007 I went to the Penrose(i think) hospital. I had some tests done. I really have no idea how healthcare works…and I thought my company was going to pay for it. I never received a notice from anyone at any point in time, until today, that I owed money. For what you ask?

Mammography. In the fall of 2007 I discovered life. Behind my right nipple. Something was growing, and it was hungry. I was actually pretty frightened, I thought I may have had breast cancer, as the beast grew to the size of a silver dollar. This evidently lead to a visual effect of a small mound that was clearly visible through my clothing.

Long story short…I thought I had boob cancer, I dont, I just paid 179 dollars to have my boob checked out. Then I realized that I only paid 179 dollars, and my healthcare at Progressive is at 90/10. 10% being my share…1790!!! FKN DOLLARS to feel up my tits? Deal.

These are boobs (.)(.) These are what my boobs looked liked ( o )(.) … I’m better now.

So unless something crazy happens, like death, I should be in LA at my hotel in exactly 36 hrs. I have also decided to trade my soul for a twitter accout. EDIT*** looks like im a liar; I made this twitter account 4 months ago…I be crazy.

http://twitter.com/gcfmathew

Follow me maybe? I’ll keep you humans up on my impulsive silly LA weekend trip. I’m going to miss a TF2 match on Sunday….BRAWRRR!!!

Suppose I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you’d want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!

“Show me,” you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle–but no dragon.

“Where’s the dragon?” you ask.

“Oh, she’s right here,” I reply, waving vaguely. “I neglected to mention that she’s an invisible dragon.”

You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon’s footprints.

“Good idea,” I say, “but this dragon floates in the air.”

Then you’ll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.

“Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless.”

You’ll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.

“Good idea, but she’s an incorporeal dragon and the paint won’t stick.”

And so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won’t work.

Now, what’s the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there’s no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I’m asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so.

The only thing you’ve really learned from my insistence that there’s a dragon in my garage is that something funny is going on inside my head. You’d wonder, if no physical tests apply, what convinced me. The possibility that it was a dream or a hallucination would certainly enter your mind. But then, why am I taking it so seriously? Maybe I need help. At the least, maybe I’ve seriously underestimated human fallibility.

Imagine that, despite none of the tests being successful, you wish to be scrupulously open-minded. So you don’t outright reject the notion that there’s a fire-breathing dragon in my garage. You merely put it on hold. Present evidence is strongly against it, but if a new body of data emerge you’re prepared to examine it and see if it convinces you. Surely it’s unfair of me to be offended at not being believed; or to criticize you for being stodgy and unimaginative– merely because you rendered the Scottish verdict of “not proved.”

Imagine that things had gone otherwise. The dragon is invisible, all right, but footprints are being made in the flour as you watch. Your infrared detector reads off-scale. The spray paint reveals a jagged crest bobbing in the air before you. No matter how skeptical you might have been about the existence of dragons–to say nothing about invisible ones–you must now acknowledge that there’s something here, and that in a preliminary way it’s consistent with an invisible, fire-breathing dragon.

Now another scenario: Suppose it’s not just me. Suppose that several people of your acquaintance, including people who you’re pretty sure don’t know each other, all tell you that they have dragons in their garages–but in every case the evidence is maddeningly elusive. All of us admit we’re disturbed at being gripped by so odd a conviction so ill-supported by the physical evidence. None of us is a lunatic. We speculate about what it would mean if invisible dragons were really hiding out in garages all over the world, with us humans just catching on. I’d rather it not be true, I tell you. But maybe all those ancient European and Chinese myths about dragons weren’t myths at all.

Gratifyingly, some dragon-size footprints in the flour are now reported. But they’re never made when a skeptic is looking. An alternative explanation presents itself. On close examination it seems clear that the footprints could have been faked. Another dragon enthusiast shows up with a burnt finger and attributes it to a rare physical manifestation of the dragon’s fiery breath. But again, other possibilities exist. We understand that there are other ways to burn fingers besides the breath of invisible dragons. Such “evidence”–no matter how important the dragon advocates consider it–is far from compelling. Once again, the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis, to be open to future physical data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion.

Brought to you by: Carl Sagan

I tried for the first time to get some demos on youtube. I didn’t realize how much of a pain it was to xmute a demo into a .avi.

Here are 2 small clips I recorded. It’s action from my team’s 7v7 TWL match on Sunday vs J.Crew on CTF_Chaos –> pre-season.

Taste it.



Different flavor now.

Seriously, let just roll everything back 2000 years, im sure it will make things better.

By Laura MacInnis

GENEVA (Reuters) – A United Nations forum on Thursday passed a resolution condemning “defamation of religion” as a human rights violation, despite wide concerns that it could be used to justify curbs on free speech in Muslim countries.

The U.N. Human Rights Council adopted the non-binding text, proposed by Pakistan on behalf of Islamic states, with a vote of 23 states in favor and 11 against, with 13 abstentions.

Western governments and a broad alliance of activist groups have voiced dismay about the religious defamation text, which adds to recent efforts to broaden the concept of human rights to protect communities of believers rather than individuals.

Pakistan, speaking for the 56-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), said a “delicate balance” had to be struck between freedom of expression and respect for religions.

The resolution said Muslim minorities had faced intolerance, discrimination and acts of violence since the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, including laws and administrative procedures that stigmatize religious followers.

“Defamation of religious is a serious affront to human dignity leading to a restriction on the freedom of their adherents and incitement to religious violence,” the adopted text read, adding that “Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism.”

It called on states to ensure that religious places, sites, shrines and symbols are protected, to reinforce laws “to deny impunity” for those exhibiting intolerance of ethnic and religious minorities, and “to take all possible measures to promote tolerance and respect for all religions and beliefs.”

ISLAMOPHOBIA, CHRISTIANOPHOBIA, ANTI-SEMITISM

The 47-member Human Rights Council has drawn criticism for reflecting mainly the interests of Islamic and African countries, which when voting together can control its agenda.

Addressing the body, Germany said on behalf of the European Union that while instances of Islamophobia, Christianophobia, anti-Semitism and other forms of religious discrimination should be taken seriously, it was “problematic to reconcile the notion of defamation (of religion) with the concept of discrimination.”

“The European Union does not see the concept of defamation of religion as a valid one in a human rights discourse,” it said. “The European Union believes that a broader, more balanced and thoroughly rights-based text would be best suited to address the issues underlying this draft resolution.”

India and Canada also took to the floor of the Geneva-based Council to raise objections to the OIC text. Both said the text looked too narrowly at the discrimination issue.

“It is individuals who have rights, not religions,” Ottawa’s representative told the body. “Canada believes that to extend (the notion of) defamation beyond its proper scope would jeopardize the fundamental right to freedom of expression, which includes freedom of expression on religious subjects.”

A separate, EU-sponsored resolution about religious discrimination is due to be discussed by the Council on Friday.

Earlier this week, 180 secular, religious and media groups from around the world urged diplomats to reject the resolution which they said “may be used in certain countries to silence and intimidate human rights activists, religious dissenters and other independent voices” and ultimately restrict freedoms.

Condemnation of defamation of religion had been included in a draft declaration being prepared for an April U.N. conference on racism, known as “Durban II,” but was removed earlier this month after Western countries said it was unacceptable.

Full article here.

Mr. Pope says, ““So many of them are living in fear of spirits, of malign and threatening powers. In their bewilderment they even end up condemning street children and the elderly as alleged sorcerers.”

…

Satan? Demons? Exorcisms? Talking snake? The 10 plagues? How are these things not considered spirits or malign and threatening powers? … Oh yeah, the Pope is batshit crazy.

Stuff. Things. Update. Pointless.

Wewt.

Bored as hell.

Fuck yeah

Homeopathy with no borders.

First off. For those who do not know what homeopathy is, let me provide you some insight.

From Wikipedia.

“In producing treatments for diseases, homeopaths use a process called “dynamisation” or “potentisation” whereby the remedy is diluted with alcohol or distilled water and then vigorously shaken by ten hard strikes against an elastic body in a process called “succussion”. Hahnemann thought that the use of remedies which present symptoms similar to those of disease in healthy individuals would only intensify the symptoms and exacerbate the condition, so he advocated the dilution of the remedies. During the process of potentisation, homeopaths believe that the vital energy of the diluted substance is activated and its energy released by vigorous shaking of the substance. For this purpose, Hahnemann had a saddle maker construct a special wooden striking board covered in leather on one side and stuffed with horsehair.”

Now lets get back to “succussion”, or from here on out, we’ll call it shaking shit, as that’s all they’re fucking doing.

So lets say I’m a crazy person who practices homeopathy. I’m now going to make a remedy for the flu. Whatever substance I have for this remedy im going to take 1 part of it and dillute it into 99 parts water. I.E. for every drop of the remedy substance, I will mix it with with 99 drops of water. This is just the fist step. This dillution is called 1C. The C stands for centesimal or “c scale”, basically a system to determine how well a remedy has been produced/its potency. 1C being the smallest. Each scale of C means it’s been dilluted by a factor of 100.

Oh yeah, after you mix the 1 drop with the 99 drops of water, you gotta shake it up too…so you can release the energy and stuff. But yeah, shaking it around is the important part.

So now we want to make this remedy stronger, as 1C is not good enough. So after mixing the remedy with 99 parts water we now have a solution that is 1% the remedy and 99% water. Normally in modern medicine you increase doses to provide stronger effects, this is not the case in homeopathy. So we can now take this new solution which already contains a mere 1% of the remedy and throw away 99% of it . Now take the remaining 1% and start the entire process over again. So we started out with 1% of 100%, shake it up, take away 1%, and mix this with another 99 parts water. You do this over and over and over again, until you reach an acceptable homeopathy centesimal level of 30C.

Let me put this into perspective.

A 30X dilution means that the original substance has been diluted:

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times.

That’s a pretty big fucking number. What gets even crazier, is that 30C is not the end. Some remedies continue up to and beyond 200C. Numbers don’t work too well to convey the enormosity in my opinion. So check this. This is in referrence to 30C, so you can (not really) imagine the ridiculousness of 200C.

Information below pulled from:
(http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/homeo.html)

Assuming that a cubic centimeter of water contains 15 drops, this number(30C) is greater than the number of drops of water that would fill a container more than 50 times the size of the Earth. Imagine placing a drop of red dye into such a container so that it disperses evenly(you have to shake it!). Homeopathy’s “law of infinitesimals” is the equivalent of saying that any drop of water subsequently removed from that container will possess an essence of redness.

And this is the shit that will cure you.

There are laws of chemistry that state that there is a limit to a dilution that can be made without losing the original substance altogether. This limit, which is related to Avogadro’s number, corresponds to homeopathic potencies of 12C. Once you past this limit, the chances of a SINGLE MOLECULE that you started with existing in any future dillutions is non-existant.

Homeopathy has a counter though. MAGIC! Remeber that shaking we did earlier to release the ENERGY? Well, you don’t need the actual matter/molecules you started out with, because we have the MAGICAL ENERGY NOW! How convienent!

If this is truely true, ANY SUBSTANCE that contacts water would transfer it’s essence and/or energy to it. Which would mean, any water you drink in the world, could have a multiude of unwanted medical effects.

Even under the most scrupulously clean conditions, airborne dust in a manufacturing facility must carry thousands of different molecules of biological origin derived from local sources that would contaminate and release unwanted energy durring the shaking process.

If anything, homeopathy is a placebo effect. The placebo effect is very strong, and works very well, in regards to the fact it reduces stress. It’s a scientific fact that a reduction of stress can help the human body recover faster. The placebo effect does not CURE anything, it aids your body by reducing stress…that’s it.

When you start marketing placebos to cure aids, malaria, cancer, or any other un-cureable disease, that’s when you cross the fucking line. Right now, look around at some homeopathy sites and you will definately fine “cures” for many uncureable diseases. And people actually take this as truth and will avoide western/modern medicine and instead, trust magic.

And now they want to take this shit to other countries with substandard healthcare and medicine, so they can improve their well being. I fucking hate people.

THIS