Deny Everything

(Note: Now updated with correct spelling!)

Who is this guy Pat Robertson and why is he such a liar?

What's even worse than suggesting that the US should assassinate Venezuelan president Chevez to solve our diplomatic differences, is his politician-like denial of his own statements.

I didn't say "assassination." I said our special forces should "take him out." And "take him out" can be a number of things, including kidnapping; there are a number of ways to take out a dictator from power besides killing him. I was misinterpreted by the AP, but that happens all the time.

Hmm. You didn't say assassination? What about this quote?

If he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war.

So he's right, he didn't say "assassination" he said "assassinate." He didn't use the passive noun form of the word, he used the present-tense verb form. Our mistake sorry about that, please continue.

I think we really ought to go ahead and do it.

Is Pat Robertson prepared to deny that we does not include him, and that it is not referring to the assassination of the Venezuelan president? If so, Mr. Robertson is abusing the English language in a remarkable mind-bending way.

As far as this quote is concerned:

We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability. We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one strong-arm dictator. It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with.

So Mr. Robertson wants to "get rid of" Chevez and "take him out", and we need "covert operatives" to do it. Considering we were just talking about assassination as a cheaper solution than going to war, it's pretty reasonable to assume that Robertson is referring to assassination here to. But Robertson says he just wants to kidnap Chevez. Oh well, it's not as violent but this quote is just icing on the cake anyway.

I believe in freedom of speech and so I don't object to Robertson saying what he feels, I just don't like liars. Maybe Robertson forgot he said the first quote involving the words "assassinate" and "go ahead and do it", but you'd think that before correcting the press on the specific garbage that spewed from his mouth he'd check a transcript.

Even CNN reported that Pat Robertson denied calling for Chevez's assassination "despite contrary video evidence". I'm happy CNN is exposing Robertson's statements for all to see and standing up to his bullshit. The full video of Robertson's comments are available on their site. Gotcha Pat.

In conclusion, Pat Robertson is either a liar, an idiot, or both.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/08/24/robertson.chavez/index.html

Blurring Good and Evil

One thing I find very interesting is the differing views of Christianity and its antithesis Satanism.

Christianity teaches to love thy neighbor. Love God as well. It is very non-selfish. Satanism on the other hand teaches to love yourself.

Christianity teaches that sex is a sin. If sex is wrong, then ideally, if everyone was a perfect Christian, the human race would die out. I cannot help but conclude that a goal of Christianity is the extinction of the human race. This seems ridiculous of course.

I also enjoy the two societal extremes of chaos and order, anarchy and civilization. It would seem at first that anarchy is a rather Satanic way to live, whereas civilization is the ordered Chirstian counterpart.

However considering that a goal of Satanists is to enslave those around them, which societal model would allow for this? I would argue that civilization is a purely Satanic idea.

Satanists enjoy pleasure and pursue it. Civilization makes life easier and gives people pleasure. On the other hand, anarchy would most likely lead to more suffering. Which religious viewpoint glorifies suffering?

Christ did not tell us what to do on Earth while we're here. Apparently we're not supposed to be having sex, and as a result we're not building families. So what are we doing here? Existing until we die, making sure to pray to God on a regular basis. We should not want on this Earth. Wanting something besides the love of God would take away from His glory. I find this extreme to be true, and amusing.

Under this view, it is clear to me that anything constructive on this Earth (such as civilization) arises from a Satanic motivation, since there should be no other motivation. The perfect Christian would find God's love and waste away and die, unmoving. After all, what happens on Earth is irrelevant compared to the heaven that awaits.

So is civilization evil? I would argue (stepping out of the religious world now) that too much civilization is bad, and that always some anarchy is necessary. I don't think we've even come close to that level yet, but it is something I wonder about. If society is structured, you always have to worry about who's on top.

Hiking and Highpoints

It is often the case that climbers create or adopt lists with the goal of hiking to as many points on the list as possible, with the eventual goal of completing the list. This can give hikers a sense of accomplishment that can help in motivation.



Lists of destinations that rank notable geographic points on the Earth by some criteria are informative, useful, and fun. Informative, since they highlight certain otherwise overlooked points, useful since they help hikers select climbing destinations, and fun since they allow hikers to set climbing goals.

However, it is important that ranked lists of points are designed to fulfill the purposes of the hiker. The criteria of each list should select the destinations that are most appropriate for the climber's needs. Here is a brief list of some of the possible requirements of hikers:

- technical difficulty of easiest ascent
- length of hike from closest access
- vertical gain from highest access
- climate
- scenic/geographic environment
- height
- recognition in climbing community
- fulfills interesting list criteria

For some it is enough that the climbing list criteria is interesting, obscure or popular to continue to be motivated. Others are seeking recognition from the climbing community in some way and wish to focus on well-known peaks. Still others are looking for climbs with specific attributes. No matter what the criteria is, it is important that the hiker understand the list criteria, so that they know why they are hiking the items on a list.

This article attempts to analyze each type of climbing list criteria and determine the applicability of each criteria for satisfying hiking list requirements.



Nearest Higher Neighbor

Nearest Higher Neighbor (NHN) is a way of measuring how far a peak is from it's nearest higher point of land. Note that this defintion does not refer to the distance to the nearest higher summit. Using the NHN criteria for a ranked list will produce peaks that are separated geographically.

NHN is moderately useful for hikers that value recognition, as this criteria does pick many of the most popular peaks, although since the selected peaks will be selected somewhat evenly over a region, there may be peaks selected in unpolulated areas.

NHN is a good way to include peaks that are high only with respect to other peaks in the area. Although these peaks may not compare favorably in height to Himalayan ones, they will probably be popular in their parts of the world.

NHN favors peaks that are on islands and peninsulas, since water helps distance them from other peaks. As a result, very low peaks may be included even though they are not particularly high.

Prominence

Prominence should be used carefully to rank mountains. Prominence does not use concepts such as summit height and distance to other higher peaks to rank each mountain, and as a result, hikers should clearly understand what prominence is, and what types of mountains lists based on prominence will produce.

The only requirement for a prominent peak is that you must descend a certain elevation in order to reach a higher point. That elevation difference is the peak's prominence. Prominence is NOT a good judge of how far the peak is from other higher peaks. NHN criteria should be used for this. It is a good judge of how independent the peak is from other higher peaks.

Although prominent peaks have a greater chance of being steep over other methods, prominence does not guarantee this either.

Prominence will often pick the highest peak in a range of mountains, which gives the impression that prominence will give you a good sampling of diverse areas in a chosen region. Most of the time it will, but prominence will favor terrain that is more jagged and could pick several peaks bunched together if there is no saddle between them. When this occurs, the hiker may end up hiking peaks that although are probably worthy climbs by other definitions, may suffer from a lack of geographic displacement.

Highpointing

Highpointing is for those who are primarily looking for recognition. Most highpointing lists are accepted, understood, and can be appreciated by the general public.

Highpointing is the act of visiting each of a set of locations that are grouped because they are the highest points of land within the geographic or political areas that constitute the set of regions satisfying a certain highpointing criteria. Usually, highpointing refers to visiting the highest point of land in each continent, country, or US state.

Highpointing is usually a good way to select geographically displaced peaks. However, depending on the political boudaries used, there may be a higher concentration of highpoints where regions are more finely divided.

Using this method may pick very low points if some of the highpoints are in flat low lying areas. Also, the highest point in each division may not be a summit if a mountain's foundation straddles a boundary.

Isolated Summits

Lists which rank the highest isolated summits are appropriate for hikers looking for the highest peaks, plain and simple. By using prominence as a requirement, local sub peaks that shouldn't be counted as mountains in their own right are eliminated from the list.

These summits may not always be the most popular peaks, and they may be grouped together geographically, but they do tend to be the most difficult.



So which criteria should you use? Prominence seems like a good way to go, although those looking for a greater geographic sampling may want to add a NHN requirement as well.

An interesting formula to use might be: Importance = NHN (in miles) + Prominence (in feet). Unfortunately NHN and Prominence Lists are hard to find on the Internet these days.

Those looking for recognition should consider the Highpointing lists. There is in fact a whole community of highpointers out there trying to get to the highest point in each state, or in each country, or all the peaks above a certain elevation in a certain region.

http://www.highpointers.org/
http://americasroof.com/world.shtml
http://www.cohp.org/prominence

The Final Frontier

As the brilliant Carl Sagan pointed out in his book Pale Blue Dot, religion and science are essentially at war, and actually they've been duking it out for over a thousand years. Interestingly, the main dispute does not encompass politics, natural resources or national boundaries as is usual in most wars. Instead the struggle is for the spiritual landscape of existence.

Christianity, and other one-God-based religions attest to the sanctity and permanence of the soul. It is taken as fact that humans are special and different from other lifeforms. The Bible also proclaims the importance of the Earth as the centerpiece of the universe, built for us to house our magnificence, as God's lesser clones.

Over the centuries as science has progressed, the human race has been able to explain more and more natural phenomena using simple, natural means. As our understanding of the universe grows, science claims more and more territory that was previously "unexplainable" as "explainable" or sometimes even: "not just explainable but also observable and testable".

In this way, science has been whittling away at the unexplainable world, a realm usually claimed by philosophy and especially religion. With each new scientific discovery or theory, science cuts out another swathe of intellectual space, extending the bounds of what it can reasonably explain. However this encroachment onto what some assume is sacred religious ground is not won easily.

The first major fender bender with religion occurred during the era of Copernicus and Galileo when they proposed that the Earth was not the center of our solar system. These were truly "heretical ideas" which were frowned upon by the religious leaders of the time. Over the centuries, this radical concept gained acceptance. The Earth was not the center of the Universe after all, the sun was.



So began what Carl Sagan calls "The Great Demotions." Later we discovered that even our solar system is not special, our sun is just one of billions of stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way. And in fact our galaxy is not special either, it is just one of billions of galaxies all flying away from each other in a giant explosion of galaxies resulting from the big bang. Each realization further shows that we exist on an arbitrary world amongst many in a vast wilderness of space.

And even now science has not stopped trying to demonstrate our true insignificance in the universe. With the recent discoveries of large planets that orbit distant stars, we have confirmed that our solar system is not the only one to harbor planets. Soon, we will begin discovering smaller Earth-size planets and show that there may be other Earths out there too.

Our recent explorations of Mars and our investigations of other stellar bodies in our solar system have uncovered rich geologic histories on par with Earth's. In the case of Mars, we have recently shown that water must have existed on the surface long ago, and scientists are formulating detailed and complicated histories of its geologic past. It is clear that time passes and history happens every day in other parts of the universe, despite our ignorance of events we can't see.



At the same time that we are confirming the unblessed nature of our planet in the universe, we are unraveling the human soul. There are barely any biological processes in the body that are currently unexplained. When Watson and Crick discovered the presence of DNA inside each cell's nucleus, they were able to explain what guides the creation and function of every cell in the body. We now know how just about every part of the human body operates, and how we grow from a single cell into creatures with numerous organs operating in harmony. Science is allowing us to explore the operation of the brain and discover what allows the human mind to create consciousness itself.

With our current understanding of physics, chemistry and biology, there is nothing in the universe or in our bodies that either already has a scientific explanation, or that science cannot be reasonably extrapolated to include. God's creation of the heavens is not necessary, we have the big bang and modern physics to explain the current shape of the universe. Souls are not strictly necessary, the physical operation of the human body and brain is explainable without a supernatural presence. Even the creation of life itself is explainable, thanks to Darwin.

And it is evolution, over a hundred years after being first proposed, that is still under attack by the religious masses. No single scientific theory stands to reclassify more territory in the "unexplainable" realm as "explainable." With evolution and the theory of origin of species, we can explain the existence of life as we know it on Earth. If humans evolved from single-cell organisms, and the cell developed from other self-replicating structures, and these structures were created accidentally (a conceivable idea) on our primordial Earth long ago, we don't need the notion that a supernatural being (whose origins are unexplainable) created us.

There is so much overwhelming evidence for evolution that it seems like pure insanity that anyone would propose teaching intelligent design in schools. There is just no need to superimpose a supernatural, mystical savior of humankind over a consistent and rational scientific model of the world, which exists perfectly by itself. And despite creationist arguments, there is no evidence against the theory of evolution except for anomalies that occasionally come up due to minor accuracy problems in radioactive-dating methods. The bottom line anyway is that in science class, only science should be taught. And pardon me but theories that involve supernatural beings is not science.

What we have now is a universe that is almost totally within the realm of scientific explanation. Except for the stimulus of the big bang, and our persistent internal perceptions of consciousness, we don't really need a supernatural being at all any more to answer life's questions.

However God is still performing the important tasks of providing moral guideance and saving souls so unfortunately I doubt we'll see an end to people's need for God anytime soon.

Submitted For Your Approval

From the Associated Press:

August 10, 2005

SEOUL, South Korea --A 28-year-old South Korean man died of exhaustion in an Internet cafe after playing computer games non-stop for 49 hours, South Korean police said Wednesday.

Lee, a resident in the southern city of Taegu who was identified only by his last name, collapsed Friday after having eaten minimally and not sleeping, refusing to leave his keyboard while he played the battle simulation game Starcraft.

Lee was quickly moved to a hospital but died after a few hours, due to what doctors are presuming was a heart attack, police said.

Lee had been fired from his job last month because he kept missing work to play computer games, police said.

Computer games are enormously popular in South Korea, home to professional gamers who earn big money through sponsorships and television stations devoted to broadcasting matches.

---------

Here are some of the headlines out there being used for this article by different news sites:

Man dies after 49 hours of computer games
28-year old man dies after 50-hour long gaming marathon
Gamer plays himself to death
Video Game Marathon Kills Geek
Man dies after 50 hour videogame binge
Computer games kill nerd
Korean drops dead after 50-hour gaming marathon
Death after 50 hours of gaming
Computer geek's game of death
War gamer dies after 50-hour virtual battle

All of these headlines are beating around the bush here. What really happened here is that after two days of non-stop gaming, you are digitized and pulled into the game where you become the protaganist. If you lose while inside the game, your physical body suffers lethal consequences. It's all in the movie Tron, rent it to learn more.



Apparently this is a major problem!

http://www.xtremepccentral.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-2998.html

http://smh.com.au/articles/2003/02/28/1046407746465.html

It's Been Awhile

Sometimes you're having so much fun its disgusting and you totally lose track of your life's priorities. Such was the case for the last two weeks during which I am ashamed to say I had what is normally an impermissible quantity of fun.

The only casualties of my recent endorphin rampage were the individual neural networks of you, my trusting fans, which have no doubt undergone a shocking level of understimulation while I have been regretably unable to form coherent thoughts and gain access to a computer terminal at the same time.

It is my hope that I will be able to entertain, enlighten and confound for untold months before I suffer another lapse of spontaneous holiday.