The Sue-ability Scale

February 5th, 2010 Thomasso

Lawyers, you may not want to read this, this might be a tough pill to swallow? These are my personal thoughts based on my personal experiences with Civil Court.

Justice is a weird thing. I have studied it to death and it still leaves me scratching my head wondering, asking why-and the answers become as vague as following a white car in the middle of a snowstorm. I have found that justice in Canada is only for those who are rich, or are very clever. That in most cases if you are being sued in civil court, it is better not to participate than it is to waste your time with the process of jurisprudences; and flip side to this, if you are rich, you are an easy target than compared to someone who is poor and homeless. Seriously, of the five people in my life that I have brought to the halls of justice, only one took the pledge and participated. The other four knew the system well enough not to bother, and I found it (almost) impossible to seek my claim, costs, damages and compensation. In fact, the one time that I was the respondent, it was easer to go on with my life than it was to play the game. To this day, the company that I had an agreement with is still out the initial $72.00, but they are also out on their costs too, so it pays not to bother with Canadian Justice if you have nothing to loose. Was it worth my time to show up—I’m still evaluating that?

I now know that there is a scale that the professionals follow when they go out on suing expeditions. They automatically drop anyone who has no money; who is renting; earning a low wage; has no bank account; has little or no identification, i.e., drivers license or birth certificate; uses aliases and moves around a lot. However, for the poor there is this thing called Small Claims Court, or the Pauper’s Court as it is called in my circles, but you still need to pay to use it though. When I studied Medieval legal systems of European cultures, Small Claims Court to me has a reminiscent quality of early continental European courts where the jurist is free to adjust, amend, vary and control all aspects of the hearing and decisions—although you can appeal in today’s court. One day I was helping a friend fight for his money from a debtor, and once it was our turn, the sitting judge read the Statement of Claim, then threw up his arm up with the documents in hand and said, “You expect to me rule on this? I think you should go back and talk to this person and make the effort on collecting your money before you go into my court.” Perhaps it was because we were not wearing $900.00 suites at the time? I’m still in awe to this day about that?

If you do have something to loose like a house, wages, assets, or your respondent has too, then going to court is the way to go. I have also seen the dual effects of court at play many times as the monetary and psychological costs play their toll and all parties. The trouble is, court is not a guaranteed bet. Just when you thought you had the full force of the law on your side, you are hit with a sucker-punch and your case falls like a house of cards. In one case of mine, I filed for a garnishment of wages and the respondent’s employer decided not to cooperate. The business told me that he does not work in their department any more. I found myself having to take extraordinary measures to track down who this person really worked for before I could I proceed with the action. This involved two days of driving by this guy’s work every ten minutes searching for what door he came out of. Then once I saw him walking out to go home, I went into the building and had to do some quick lurking. I asked one of the managers that I was looking for my “friend.” When I confirmed that that was the respondent’s employer, I then went to the manager’s office to serve the garnishment order. I received two out of the five payment to fulfil the debt, but then they stopped as the guy quit his job and moved elsewhere. I just recovered only my court costs in that case. Was it worth it? At least I got to play the psych-game with him.

Posted in Criminology, Diatribe, General, Law, Law and Order, Social Justice | No Comments »

Escaping from the Tomb – Trying to Write a Single Post

February 4th, 2010 Thomasso

In my little crypt called the office/bedroom, I sit. I have tired on several occasions to write a post, but every time up until now I had being either tired, busy or distracted. The main reasons are the bits of homework and alternating mid-terms from each of my courses that are always pulling at my available time. It seems that for each week I have at least one mid-term to study for and write. This doesn’t include the continuous weekly assignment from my Stats class, nor the constant rushing of French assignment that are done on-line through the course website. From Sunday to Wednesday I work in over-drive, trying to keep up, on top and ahead of the courses. Though though?

The end is near. With just a couple of courses left, I will completed my gaols. Already one of my “certificates” arrived by mail last week. I now have my courses completed from the Justice Institute, and along with  my Associates Degree in Criminology is now complete. In less than five months I will earned enough credits to earn my Bachelor of Art in Criminology, and then on to graduate school, which I have already started. Possibly, with some hard work, I will be invited to go into a Honours program, but that is still up in the air as the application process only allows students to apply once a year in January. I missed the boat with not having my language – thus French classes – ya, poor me.

I’ve already had my first long talk of the reality of working in the field of Criminology & Psychology among the realm of Corrections Canada -  if you hate your job now, wait ’till you start working as a Psychologist. My prof from my 4th year, who did his doctorate degree on studying sex offenders, told me this. He was dead serious too. I think this was that “talk” that the master says to his students before they embark into the world with their new skills, but it is hard to tell if he was just having a bad day or not? This was the same guy who told me that if I really wanted to learn French I should buy some French soft porn. I would have a small but effective vocabulary, but not very helpful if I was stuck in the middle of Montreal or Paris. Yes, Criminologists do have a sense of humour.

I’m running into old high school buddies – it’s the weirdest thing. Out of the blue this strange looking man, balding, grey hair and surrounded by four teens comes, starts walking up to me saying, “are you Tom?” Then next thing I know I’m being propelled back to 1989, and we start talking about the “good old days.” But due to our busy lives we agree to keep in touch and exchange numbers, then we continued on our way. That is another post, and for another time, but I can assure you all that I learned some very interesting things about people I knew a long time ago from my youth.

I like to say some things about Stats before I close. I got into a argument with a friend about statistics. My friend claims that there is absolutely no way that you can say anything, like make predictions, or assumptions, or correlations about the population from polling just a handful of people and call it a fact. To my friend and the rest of you, I say this: Scientists always start off by proving that their hypothesis are wrong, and they go to the extremes to prove that. If the effect is not significant, i.e., in the top 5 percent of the scores, than it does not pass as significant. A good scientists will always post their data, along with their assumptions, so that their peers, or you, can test them. The goal is that this give the rest of the scientific community a chance to replicate the data and peer review your findings – proving that you are valid, or off your rocker. Only those who have mercury running through their veins do stats for a living and have the title of statistician I should add.

Posted in Criminology, General, University classes | No Comments »

Status: Normal? I tihnk?

January 31st, 2010 Thomasso

Although this is the last day of January, 2010, and this is the last day of the week, I feel I did not accomplished everything I wanted. Sure, I fell behind on my readings and there are a few tasks at work that I have yet to do, but I get this weird feeling that I missed a whole section of my life. Perhaps this is what it feels like when you go without a good nights sleep for so long, or you try to make every second of every day count and be as productive as possible that you forget to smell the roses? Or you forget that you have a blog and you miss writing in it?

Interestingly I have one more week before the Surrey campus shuts down for the “Games.” Many weeks leading up to the Games I was pissed off that my life would be affect by it, for example, the Games being a major inconvenience becuase I would be loosing three weeks of classes, but now I do not give a @%#^* any more, and I am actually very happy that I will have those three weeks to collect my thoughts and barrel through all of my reading and write my research papers too. So loosing classes is not such a bad thing after all, I mean, we will get an extra week added in April, so it is not that bad. I think the university thought this though enough to satisfy everyone on-board.

Money is my other big issue too. I have a several large bills coming up. I have vehicle insurance, along with the Air-Care, which I have devised a plan for tuning my engine since the “Check Engine” light keeps popping up and my mechanic can not resolve this. Yes, the evil geniuses who pollute the Earth have found a way to circumvent Car-Care, without breaking any of the manufacturer’s tamper-proof systems. Big Oil does rule the people, and the government, as long as you play by their rules–like buy a 2010 SUV. Gasp! My Server fees are also coming up next week too. There goes at least $100.00 on top of everything else. The rent on my Post Office mail box is due too. Cow–I have to really what my budget this month!

well, I feel a little more happier now, I wrote a post on my blog. Do I feel better? Yes, but only to a small degree. I am still too tired to enjoy the moment though, and I do have a mid term tomorrow. Mid-term. Great. My moment of happiness just flew out the window. Wonderful.

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Rush, Rush, Rush-Push, Push, Push-Go, Go, Go!

January 29th, 2010 Thomasso

I love it when all of a sudden everyone around me starts realizing that the deadlines are right around the corner, and they have fallen behind, that they start to pass the buck onto me–do you find that for yourself too? A really good example is when you are part of a team and your project is due, and you have some team members who are “a bit slow,” and when the day finally arrives to submit, they freak out and start blaming everyone else except themselves as they show up unprepared. I have fallen victim to two such scenarios already this month, and my reaction has not being pretty.

First, I had a presentation to do with a five member group of which we were to present findings from our research on “Increases in Crime, Looking at the Correlation Between Policing and the Games in Vancouver for 2010.” We had set up a series of five meetings and only three of us made it to all of them. The other two members seemed to have put their parts off until the very last minute and literally left the rest of use hanging during the presentation. It was awkward! The second project was also class presentation, but this time I got to work solo. I like working by myself a lot more than in teams becuase I can achieve way more in a shorter period of time, and pass with flying colours. But, for whatever reason, the team concept seems to be the way corporate Canada wants to move, so the University pushes us in that direction–it is sad in some respects. I think it is just to match the slow and dumb with the fast and  smart, but who am I to judge the merits of what the world wants? But working solo means that you still need to rely on others during the process to finish, and my problems started from receiving the incorrect information from the library–a honest mistake–but no one wanted to admit that there was a mistake, or pay for fees from the first batch of files I had ordered. I refused to pay for the first set of text becuase they were not what I wanted. For some reason, the customer is always wrong, according to library’s resource department. The mistake was clearly theirs, and the acquisition paperwork clearly stated what I wanted, and it was very different from what I received the first time around. Perhaps this will get resolve soon?

Even my work has this problem too with fellow employees passing the buck and denial of wrong doing when the pooh hit the fan. Sure, this is natural, and every workplace has at least one bad apple in it. I use the “butt-covering” method to combat workplace buck-passers. In my department, I have learned to keep originals and only give out copies of important documents. I have already seen one employee try to “fraud” paperwork, and it did not go over to well for that person in the long run. I also learned not to panic when confronted with accusations by other employees, especially from other departments, but always give them space, let them talk, and allow them to sink their own ship without taking everyone with them. The art of working in teams has no bearing on performance or efficiency, I am finding, but it has everything to do with personal merit and longevity. Workplace attrition is always the best hope for those who are incompetent. So the lesson here is teams and buck-passing go hand in hand–trust no one, and look out for number one!

Now I am rambling.

The last 15 days have flown by so fast. My workload from my classes is incredible in my opinion. French is sucking up most of my time. To do the on-line work takes well over eight hours to complete for each chapter. That is way too much time required for the course. I know that the majority of the class is flying by in the course, but I never had any formal French, so I am aiming for just a pass. Yes, it take a lot longer for me to memorize and learn the spelling, but hey, I am starting from scratch. My instructor has so much patience with me–he deserve a lot more than he is getting credited for.

Statistics, or hard based Algebra? Woo-Hoo! No comment. All I can say here is that I am a SPSS sufferer, and I want to use open source so bad it hurts. Micro$oft can kiss my butt! Whoever thought that a crappy program that is worth $800.00 is a good thing for students to work with–they are sniffing glue. I will never pay for crap–especially $800.00 worth of it! I’ll take “R” any day over SPSS! OK, I am frustrated with SPSS–I admit that–don’t sue me.

At least it is Friday. Maybe I can catch up on some sleep? Naugh… An’t gonna happen.

A bientôt mon amis

Posted in Bitching about weather, Bitching about work, Diatribe, General, University classes | 1 Comment »

Living in the Null Hypothesis World

January 23rd, 2010 Thomasso

It is 8:23am on a sunny Saturday morning here on campus in Surrey, (BC – not go get mixed up with my British friends who live in the original city of Surrey) and the birds are up, and probably there is a Bee buzzing around somewhere too as you would think it is April or May around here. I am here because I have no choice. If I want to pass my exam coming up this Wednesday in my Statistics class, I have to be here. It boils down to software and textbooks, or the lack there of.

Here is my rant:

There is a big battle among many institutions and their students and faculty members on what is, or should be, the accepted tool/product for statics. Right now in my class it is SPSS, which is a wonderful tool for spitting out any statistical information you need from your hard earned data, but it is not cheap, and as I found out, it is not the only game in town. To buy the licences for SPSS, with all of its modules and updates, it is a whopping $800.00 to get it working for one year. On the other side of the coin, there is “R,” which does exactly the same thing, and many have argued that it is less buggy that SPSS. R, is free under the GNU/ Open Source agreement, so there is no real intensive for the creators to push their ware, other than the textbooks. SPSS textbooks are about the same price as the ones for R, but SPSS seems to go through more revision than R, so their textbook list are always updating. I can hear the cash registrar ringing louder and louder as I type this out.

I am very familiar with R as I have worked with it for several years now. SPSS is a challenge because it is very different to use and operate, and its look and feel is like ridding a Volkswagen with no shocks when compared to R, the Ferrari, as I see it. Part of the problem is Micro$oft, since 80 percent of the computers on campus have it installed, there is a natural tendency for the Window$ salesmen to push the statistical Micro$oft product along with it. And when you are limited to running homogeneous software for that O.S., you will get the hook, line, and sinker with an $800.00 gorilla attached to it.

In the free world, the standard is set higher with R as I see more and more people running it for their research needs. R seems to be, in my world, the standard. But I am puzzled why I read that places like MIT, in the U.S., R is the software to use in research, while in my humble little University, SPSS is the benchmark. Oddly enough from the two comparisons I did, R and SPSS give you are same answers, and you still have to use a third-party software because each still has a lousy graph creation tools. The problem is that data sets are non compatible between R and SPSS.

I am on campus because I cannot run SPSS at home because I do not have the $800.00 to use it. Sure there are lots of illegal copies of SPSS floating around, but I am past that stage in my life. I have R, but it is totally useless to my prof if she can’t open my data up to mark it. I am also behind because I could not initially afford all of the textbooks at the beginning of the semester. For the first half of January I managed to live on $82.55 because the rest of my budget went to getting 3/4 of the needed textbooks. On my last pay day, on week three of the semester,  I finally got the last textbook, the SPSS book at a cost of $170.00. Now you know why I am so behind on my studying—it is very tough to do without textbooks when you can’t study for the assignments and exams.

I’m not going to use the world scam here because I know University is really only for those who can afford it. I do have the option of dropping the course and waiting for another instructor who would hopefully use another piece of software, with cheaper textbooks, but we are not getting any younger here—right. But I can make one guarantee, I will not be using SPSS in the real world, it is R for me all the way baby!

Posted in Diatribe, General, Homework and deadlines, University classes | No Comments »

I Applaud the BC Court of Appeal’s decision on Insite

January 16th, 2010 Thomasso

One of the greatest contradictions of Canada’s “sheepish” war on drugs as been the connection between the cost of health to our healthcare system and the battle to regulate what the State thinks is good or bad for its citizens. The criminalization of drugs is a recent phenomenon that is just over a hundred years old, and was born out of attacking specific marginal and ethnic groups. Canada has a very deep cultural love affair with illegal narcotics, and none could be more so than with marijuana. But for whatever stance you choose in your ideology, albeit the left or right, the drug culture in Canada isn’t going to go away any time soon, and we have to deal with that.

Insite was born out of long term thinking and the concept of rehabilitation; in other words, having a safe place to be that offers hope is a better approach than by pushing it underground and letting the long term effects eat away at our society. The logic behind Insite is simple: safety and hope. The people who use the facility are addicted to drugs, and are at the bottom of the social ladder. Further criminalization is not going to “fix” them, but rather push them deeper into marginalization.

The nay-sayers seems to start off with the line, “If you prohibit drugs and the use of it, then that will fix the problem… .”

I argue that the nay-sayer, has not found the root cause of the problem, but has only made it even worse than the act of using the drugs in the first place. The nay-sayer needs to ask why that person has chosen to take the drugs in the first place. However, it is easer to criminalize something than to fix it—well, that seems to be Canada’s current model. But to become homeless and drug dependant means that that person has issues that go beyond the act of taking drugs. Then you reach a point where you have no where to go, you become vulnerable, and as a result you become more visible. From Hitler to Harper, the right-wing thinking is to invoke prohibition against specific marginal groups that do not appeal to middle and upper class standards, and to simply criminalize something that does not adhere to those standards seems to be the answer.

What insite does is to give these people the chance to use clean needles to inject themselves with in hopes of stopping the practice of sharing needles. The AIDS epidemic, and many other diseases too, has a direct correlation with this group of people with the sharing of needles, so it would make sense to offer clean needles than to deal with growing numbers of AIDS victims. Safety too is an issue with Insite because if that user needs further treatment, or decides to move towards kicking their habit, then there are people right there on site to offer that help. When the user is in the facility there are staff on hand that can promptly offer help if that person is in distress. I think it is far better than having someone injecting drugs in some back alley in the middle of Vancouver.

I totally agree with the British Columbia Court of Appeal on their decision to keep the jurisdiction of Instie with British Columbia’s authority, and thus allowing the facility to stay open without Federal interference. The Federal government should stop wasting our tax money on fighting this. Remember that the majority of Canadians did not vote for Harper!

Posted in Criminology, Diatribe, General, Law, Law and Order, Social Justice | 2 Comments »

If I Told You What Time it is, Would You Believe Me?

January 14th, 2010 Thomasso

In my own little stunned world I walk aimlessly around bumping into things as I think about all the stuff I need to memorize for next week’s quiz/exam/test. One person asked me what time it was, and I answered with what I read from a broken watch I was wearing. Now I would not even believe myself if I looked at it and was late for a class. Among other things besides the broken watch, I have a schedule that does not allow for any error or delay. My work and classes are so tightly pack together that one train, traffic jam, vehicle breakdown would throw the timetable into chaos. The distance I travel from one town to the other to meet the deadlines is ridiculous in my opinion, but so many others do it to, so I cannot be that stupid.

I wrote in my French assignment, “Quelle heure est-il?” but I could not pronounce the phrase out loud, so my instructor asked me to focus on saying each word aloud several times on my own. This is the problem I have with French. Phonetics is my weak point becuase I have no way of pronouncing each work correctly other than the world wide web for guidance and some poorly laid out dictionaries. The instructor asked me in my last class in French, “What time is it?” And I spewed out something like, “il est deux heures dix.” Even though I should have said something that sounded like, “eel ay duh ur dees,” (it it 2:10hr) it came out something like, “el a hu hur dess.” He was very kind and patient, and accepted the answer, but quickly moved onto the next student.

My next big adventure is advance statistics, or my fourth class of Stats. Now, I have a choice on whether or not I should have this course. This is considered one of the five evils in university on the Liberal Arts side of academia. I’m taking the challenge becuase this course will allow me to move past my four year degree and into any program beyond, like an honours degree. To have this with a BA is a very good mark of achievement, and it will open up a lot of doors. But it is one of the five evils, and it carries with it a very high attrition rate among third and fourth year students. There are two main reason for taking this course now in my overall course load: An Olympic size break, and the prof who is teaching it this term. The university is shut down for almost four weeks in February for the Olympics. Bonus! And the prof who is teaching it this term has a very good reputation for teaching Stats–she  is almost a legend on campus and becuase of this her classes are always packed.

[Tom Whining Alert - Ignore this line] This term’s textbook list is a hit to the wallet! I have to wait until tomorrow to buy the rest of them becuase the bill is about $500.00.

So Stats is going to be action packed reading once I get my books for it as I have a quiz and lab for next week, and over 70 pages of the first two chapters should have being read already. On top of that, 70 more pages of text have to be read and understood by next Thursday for that quiz. The lab I have to do on campus, and the average amount of time to do it is roughly four hours! Could you imagine someone pulling off five courses like this per term–you would never sleep.

In my own little world I walk around aimlessly bumping into things trying to memorise everything… .

Posted in Diatribe, General, Homework and deadlines, University classes | 2 Comments »

Will Tom Ever Speak in different Tongues?

January 12th, 2010 Thomasso

I remember in my grade eight English class how my teacher, Mr. Phillips, said that English is the hardest language in the world to learn and master. After years of post secondary education, studying Philosophy, Human Development, Language Arts, Child Psychology and Biology, for an anglophone to learn another language is far tougher than the struggling two year old is with English, or the language spoken in the house. I really believe that people like Dr. Steven Pinker got it right when he said that our brains are wired for language, but biology has put it so that we do this very early in our development between the ages two and three becuase communication is so important to us both as individuals and as a society.

For adults to learn another language it a through struggle, well, especially for me anyway. I already learned my mother tongue, English, and I have gotten by with it very well. However, the powers that be, who set the standards for academic studies, have decreed that all students who wish to master in their graduating studies must have a language component in their curriculum to graduate. For me, I have chosen the language of French. So the question of having being a uni-linguist for more than thirty years will no doubt have an impact on my ability to master the French language.

Speaking French, I will always have the anglophone accent in my words, and will probably have the verb and noun mix-ups that make English such a twisted language too. Oh, and then there are the masculine and feminine nouns too which really messes me up. Then there is the reading, writing and listening skills that go along with learning any new language-did I say this was going to be tough already?

I bring up Dr. Seven Pinker into my post because he studied in great length how the mind creates language. Like I said before, the mind is wired from birth to start communicating, so when a child reaches the age of two or three the language has taken shape and the child has copied its parents sounds right to the pronunciation of the dialect. When you really break it down, a two year old starts to form words into sentences that are understood by their parents and others around them. Language is really complex, yet a child can master it a few months. But it takes more effort for an adult to learn an new language than a child. Once the circuity has being formed, the brain has a hard time relearning language, but this does not mean that it is impossible, just requires more energy and time.

For a really good read on language development and child/adult psychology, I recommend, The Language Instinct, How the Mind Creates Language, by Dr. Steven Pinker, 1994.

Posted in Diatribe, General, University classes | 1 Comment »

Buns of Steel at 108C.

January 8th, 2010 Thomasso

I believe that I can prove that the old saying that people who are experts in their chosen field should not venture off into other fields and lay the claim that they are successful at them. Like the doctors who diagnose themselves, to the lawyers who represent themselves, there is a well defined reason why the patient and client should not become part of the treatment and challenge process. Professionals are best to conduct themselves at their craft and call that their landmark achievement, while leaving the cooking up to someone else who can do a better job.

Volunteering is a time honoured tradition among academics. It is how they get their foot in the door at the very beginning of their careers. But volunteering is also a two way street that if the wrong turn is made, this could land you down a dead-end alley with no way of backing out of it. To say, at the goodness of your heart, that you are going to use your time and effort for the greater good is the noble quality that sets one apart from the rest, but that time should also include your best performance too, or the cause may end with not so good of consequences.

Last night, after my last class of the week, my friends and I decided to go to a small gathering at Colleen’s house. (Not her real name). She lives less than five minutes from the University and is quite the host of small gatherings, in fact, legendary. About three years ago I first went to one of her gathering, and was amazed at her skills as a hostess because the whose who of the University go their from my clique, so you get to meet a wide spectrum of students from the campus there. It is also a great opportunity to meet some of the big-wigs too in the field of Criminology from the Vancouver area because of its location. But back then, the rule was, you bought your own food, like a pot-luck event, everyone was expected to do it. I did not know that there was a reason for this rule?

Now Colleen is a very nice person, and she gave me permission to write this, but I also wanted to keep her real identity a secret because she too taunts people with her secret—and the surprise is always best kept for the newbie. Her sense of humour is unmatched by any standard. I heard of her through the campus grapevine, but the rumour was nothing close to what I saw when I first met her because you see, I was told that she had “buns of steel.” What I saw was nothing close to a body builder’s perfect form, but the opposite; the heaviest thing she lifts are her textbooks, and maybe only two or three at a time.

We entered the threshold of her home and the smell of baking bread was in the air. We all sat down in the living room where several chairs had being strategically laid out, and then Colleen greeted us with orange juice, coffee and muffins. I sat directly by the “fake” fireplace, and was automatically in charge of adding more chairs because the extra chairs are kept there too. Sitting in that location also meant that I was right in the path of the on coming traffic from the kitchen area. It was then, as I just sat down and made myself comfortable, that I heard Colleen asking me to help her in the kitchen.

Like a page out of a horror novel, there sitting in a tin tray were freshly baked buns of bread. With her oven mitts on, she picked up the tray and shook the buns off into a wicker basket and asked me to try one. Not even a fork could penetrate the mortar encased shell of the pumpernickel. We laughed as I said, “My dear, you do indeed have buns of steel.” And she replied, “I guess formula 108C doesn’t work either…”

Posted in Criminology, General, Humour | No Comments »

Doomsday Documentaries Are Really Stupid

January 7th, 2010 Thomasso

OK, you have seen them, on the Discovery Channel, stories of prophecies where some dude two or three hundred years ago writes a bunch of letters that says the Earth will end either in some fiery ball, or mankind nukes himself to death and all life ceases. They come in all forms, from biblical predictions, to a crazy guy who might have been severely nuts in today’s standards, all saying the same thing – the Earth will end.

Whether the predictions come to pass or not, it is the people that I run into who make me laugh when they tell me about them. When the air time on television increases the numbers of these doomsday documentaries, the more entrenched some of my regulars become. They become so transfixed that this is the honest truth because of the proliferation of these documentaries that arguing with them that they are just predictions becomes a moot point. From the Mayan Calendar that only tells time up until 2012, to the earth loosing its magnetic field in twenty years, these are just some of the weird things I hear people  saying that will spell doom for the Earth.

The problem is that even the documentaries get it wrong, or they just focus on the out come like fear-mongering, rather than asking the real questions of what the prognosticators are really saying, or not saying. And of course stuff gets lost in the translation. The point I am making here is that all of these predictions are so steeped in vagueness and ambiguity that they could literally translate into anything for anyone, especially if you have an agenda like profiting from doomsday documentary making?

Maybe the real question here is why are people so caught up in these prophets and their prophesies? Wishful thinking that they, the believers, will be only ones left on the planet and it will be up to them to sow the seeds of mankind thereafter. So much for the gene pool.

There is so much scientific observations that proves otherwise that it is so hard not to keep a straight face when hearing the doomsday conspiracies. The predictions are just so absurd to logic that it becomes really good comedy. The man who told me about the Earth loosing its magnetic field said that we will float away, our atmosphere will get sucked into space, and only those who choose to live in underground homes will survive. It is the “no atmosphere” part that throws a ringer into my buddy’s plans. But hey, he supposedly got if from a documentary so who am I to argue!

Posted in Diatribe, General, Humour, Law and Order | No Comments »