Education must be from birth to 6 years old

To know how effective early education is just watch the fundamentalist religious sects like Bahai's, Fundamentalist Jews, Menonites and other Christian sects. They start the intense religious education of their children very early and by 6 years old, these young ones have been totally converted to that religion in a way that rarely any one of them can break away from the path later in life and nearly all of them remain faithful to the sect and belief. Because early education to the brain is like operating system to the computer. You can't change the operating system once it is installed, you can upload and install other software, but the main operating system will always be there. No other software can be run without the operating system and if they don't run on the operating system, they are rejected.

When the fundamentalist groups can do it so good, why can't we, the rational science loving normal people do the same? The governments should start education much earlier. But what they do? They only accept the children after 6. By that time, any alchoholic, addict, mentally sick, uneducated parent has already clouded their children's mind enough that no education in the world can change them.

If we want a better world, nothing can cut to the bone and no road is more direct to it than a good early education.

SO MUCH WEALTH AND SO MUCH POVERTY

What is the use of creating so much wealth when most of it is absorbed by the 5% rich at the top and nothing reaches the middle and lower classes. Every year our productive powers is increased but what is the use of it for the masses? As long as the CEOs and the rich pay themselves billions of dollars, the mass of people are not going to benefit from this wealth. Reminds me when I was in England. I was always wondering why despite that this nations plundered the whole world for more than 200 years, the average British are so poor and live in much worse situation than even people in Iran, until I noticed that much of that wealth was turned into huge estates and expensive merchandise for the rich and did not reach the people.

It is so much true that "Trickle down economy would have worked miracles, if only we did not have such huge sponges at the top!".

The rich need the poor for two reasons

The rick need the poor for two reasons:

1. By charity and helping the poor they feel good about themselves. They rob them by billions and return a few thousand back to the poor and that is enough to feel good about themselves.

2. They need the comparison to know that they are so well off. If everybody lives in a mansion and drives a Ferrari how could the rich know they are rich and enjoy their wealth?

The sheep and the wolves, the people and the government

A NATION OF SHEEP WILL BEGET A GOVERNMENT OF WOLVES.



An intellectual, also an alpha male, has two options in life. Either side with the wolves and enjoy life eating the sheep, or side with the sheep and suffer like Jesus Christ. Most intellectuals choose some point in between on this scale. I highly respect the few ones who side with the sheep and forego all the benefits of being a wolf.

Socialism in Nature

When you look at nature, you notice that every complex living organism is actually a socialist state of cells. Cells gather together and work for each other. Every human body is the perfect ideal of socialism. One for all and all for one. Every cell works for the benefit of others and gives, and every cell benefits from the other cells in the community. It is heavily regulated. If cells become selfish and want to run a capitalist system in our body, we won't last for one minute.

Human societies are large complex organizations of living beings. They can only be at their best efficiency when they are socialist, like any other complex organism, like ants and bees societies.

scientists are the real prophets

Scientists are the real prophets of this world and their work is the real miracle. If ten million people pray for a rock to move an inch, it does not move a micron, but if one people uses his brain and moves the rock, it will move to the top of a mountain. Religion can't do anything for the people, it is the science that is the true miracle. From TVs to Cell Phones to cars and planes, we see the results of this miracle all around us and yet we still believe in religion instead of science.

stupid society yet still worth living in

For an intellectual, the human society is mostly illogical. The wars, the fights, the people using drugs and drinks and cigarettes. One sometimes wants to just escape the society and live like a hermit. But then, without this society we could not live longer than 40 years. Without this society we could not have health care. Without this same society we would live hungry and dirty most of our lives. So at the end of the day, existence of such an imperfect thing is better than no society of human beings.

What is Your Ideal Utopia- Part 2

* In my ideal Utopia, the human population on earth won't be more than a few million. Billions of people is too much for this poor planet, we are destroying the environment and the ecosystem totally and we are growing fast. God knows what are we going to do to the planet when our numbers are even more than today.

What is important in a population is the quality of it not the quantity. A few million Israelis have managed to beat 100 million Arabs for 50 years. Less than 100,000 Athenians established the whole foundation of arts and science of the western civilization.

* In my ideal Utopia all the manual jobs are done by robots. Human beings are free for the first time in history to focus on creative pursuits. If the economy of a robotised society is structured correctly, there won't be any poverty, and most things will be available to all free of charge.

*In my ideal Utopia education is totally free for all levels of education up to Ph.D. If we believe that the brain of the people in a society is the most valuable property of that society, we have to be ready to invest as much as we can on these brains, and that is impossible without free universal education up to Ph.D. level for everybody.

* In my ideal Utopia, the celebrities are scientists, writers, artists, philosophers, not Paris Hiltons and pop and rock and hip hop singers and Hollywood stars. The media will make them famous and naturally the public will follow where the media goes. In my Utopia, the teenagers want to be like a famous scientist or writer, not a gangster rap singer.

* In my ideal Utopia, people work out of a love of co-operation and helping each other. Nobody works for greed. People get the highest pleasure out of seeing their fruits of labour helping others and the society, not out of loading gold coins and having larger estates and luxury cars.

* In my ideal Utopia, everybody receives a minimum wage enough to sustain a decent way of life. Having a decent salary, even if people don't work, is a human right. Everybody will have at least a one bedroom house, and has access to complete free health care. When people have enough to live by, they won't fight for a morsel of food and lots of back stabbings and revenge and hatred and envy will disappear.

robots and hopeless optimists

I think I am a hopeless optimist. I see a future where robots do all the manual labour and for the first time in its history mankind is free from manual labour and left to do the real creative work. But then, when I read in the papers how military/industrial complex is enthusiastically pursuing soldier robots, I understand that I again have been too optimistic about this animal called homo sapiens. Of course, how could I forget, we are first going to use these robots to kill each other, and then will think of better uses for them.

Aliens, Us, and Chimpanzees

If an alien race visits the earth, I don't think they will differentiate much between us and our keen chimpanzees. We are not that different! What they will report to their home planet is that among all the other animals on this planet, they have found one species that is a tool maker and has managed to build pretty advanced tools. This animal tends to be social and gathers in large groups, but apart from that is not much different from other members of its branch, the primates. It is conniving, predatory, vicious, selfish, greedy. It tends to spend most of its time fighting other members of its species over resources and is very brutal towards any living thing, including its own kind.

Tibet, China and the protestors

There are lots of protests worldwide over the state of Tibet and Chinese oppression there now that they are taking the Olympic torch city to city. One thinks, would these people protest so much if Tibet was free but China was still a dictatorship oppressing its own people? I don't think so. One wonders! Are Chinese people not as important as Tibetans? Is a government allowed to oppress its own people as much as it wants, without facing any opposition abroad? Why nobody talks about the plight of the Chinese dissenters inside China? Aren't they human?

Sometimes at least, ask what I can do for my country and community!

Human societies are a lot like human body, or any other multi-cell living organism. It is true that cells benefit from living together, but it is not possible for cells to live together if they don't contribute as much as they benefit from this community. Each cell has learnt this simple fact, through billions of years of evolution, that in order to survive in a community of cells, you have to help them as much as you benefit from their help. You have to limit your selfishness and work for the common good of the community.

If every cell tries to get, and not to contribute, the body will not last for one moment. Cancerous cells are like selfish humans who don't contribute to their society and think that the society is there just for them to milk it and get rich quick. Cancer cells kill the body, and in the process, themselves.

Unfortunately many of us in our yet primitive societies have not learnt that we have to contribute to our community if we want to survive. Perhaps we can compare anti-tax neo-cons to cancerous cells. What they preach is that it is good to fleece the society and fill up your pockets in the market, but you don't have any duty towards it when it comes to paying taxes, which is paying back to the body you have been benefiting from.

Stalin, a product of Lenin! Lenin, a product of the Tsars!

I am reading a book titled "Young Stalin". It is by Simon Sebag Montefiore. I have found within the book's pages a totally different man from whom I thought Stalin was. On the one hand most biographies of Stalin are written by his enemies in exile, so can't be impartial. On the other hand, the only biographies with a positive attitude towards this dictator were written only in his lifetime in Russia and are wildly partial and off the mark. We should not forget that after his death Stalin was denounced by his own party so there were no biographies about him published later in Russia. Therefore it is hard to find an impartial book about him. Fortunately this book tries to be that, although it is more negative than positive. The author exhibits all the symptoms of a person who has not lived through similar times and is writing about a man and a time he can't FEEL anything about. I can, however, understand every word, since I have lived through similar times and can feel every moment of the young Stalin's life. I can understand why he did what he did, at least before he became the blood-thirsty dictator he was.

It is fascinating to think what would have happened to Stalin if he had lived in a different time. I try to imagine him in Canada in our time. At most, he would have been a Jack Layton, leader of the NDP. If the Bolshevik coup had been crushed and defeated, he would have been a martyr, or at least an old revolutionary émigré with lots of stories to tell about his adventurous life. He would never have become the Stalin we know now. His life would not have been much different than the life of all the Russian revolutionaries deported after October, or the life of Spanish Civil War heroes after the defeat of the Spanish government by Franco.

What made him STALIN, the worst dictator in history, was the October Revolution. Without Lenin, there could not be a Stalin. Stalin is the natural product of Lenninism. He is the legitimate son of Lenin's brutal Civil War and dictatorship. But we can't understand Lenin without understanding the suffocating dictatorship of the Romanovs and Tsarist Russia. Without that dictatorship, Lenin could not have succeeded in bringing about the October coup. The population would not be ready to tolerate so much brutality. Other parties have tried, after the October, to copy it in other countries, but where the situation was not ready, they were all defeated. German communists tried hard to have their own revolution in 1918 and 1919 but were defeated because German society was more advanced and less brutal at the time. Even British communists tried their hand at revolution in the 1920s, but it was a farce because people would just not accept a bloody revolution.

So, I believe, if we trace the roots of Stalinism, at the end of the day the blame rests with the Tsars and their stupid, backward regime. The same thing can be said about the Islamic Republic in Iran. Yes, they are brutal. But you can't blame it all on them only. Without the brutal, murderous dictatorship of the Shah, Khomeini could not have achieved success and come to power.

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I agree that Stalin could not do what he did without Lenin, but I also believe it was not necessary to be so brutal. There is no logical reason for the necessity of Stalin's extreme brutality. Russia would still become an industrial country, no matter what political system it had. Many other countries went through the same phase without any blood. IT WAS NOT NECESSARY. It was illogical and evil. It can only be explained by Stalin's personality. I believe if other members of the Bolshevik party had ruled Russia instead of Stalin there would not have been such blood bath. Even if Lenin had survived and ruled, he would not expose his fellow contrymen to such a brutality and at least not killed his own party members. Mao was a brutal communist, but he killed much less of his own party members than Stalin did, in a much larger and more populous country.

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Women and Men

I watch the pigeons on my balcony. I always used to think these are real romantic birds. Look how deeply they kiss each other. Then I watch more closely and the reality sinks in. They are not kissing, what happenes is as simple as this: The female is getting food from the male. Exactly like how a chick gets food from the parents, she pushes her beak into the males' open beak, and the male regurgitates the food to her. Instantly after she gets some food, she lays down and lets the male have his way and f... her. So no food, no sex, as simple as that. No kissing, just a simple payment.

But when you look deeper into why they do that, you understand the evolutionary reason for this behaviour. In pigeons, it is the male that feeds the chicks once they get older. The female stops feeding them when the chicks are a few weeks old, and it is the poor male that has to feed the chicks. And by getting food(or begging food) from the male, the female is actually TESTING him. She wants to know if this guy is "giving" enough to be willing and ready to share his food. The line of thought is: if he feeds me, then he will feed my chicks too.

Do the females in our species act differently?
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It is not only men who love porn? Women enjoy porn. But porn for women is different from men. Women's porn are the romantic novels and movies consumed by them in huge quantities. For them, it functions exactly as visual porn functions for men.

Why we should not expect intelligent beings in the universe

One of the latest books I have read was “A Brain for All Seasons” by William H. Calvin (University of Chicago Press- 2002). It is about the evolution of humans. I want to share some reflections on this book,

It is interesting that in 4 billion years of history of life on this planet, intelligent beings, humans, have only been around for not more than 100,000 years, which compared to that long history is just but a second. By intelligence I mean the grasp of language and the production and understanding of concepts like Arts and Philosophy and artefacts and machinery.

Bipedal apes appeared in Africa around 5 to 6 million years ago, but up to 100000 years ago they were not much more advanced than chimpanzees and gorillas. Intelligence and a big brain with capacity for thinking, memorizing the past and planning for future, appeared in one small and isolated group of these mammals only by chance. Life can and could have gone on this planet for the remaining billions of years without any intelligent beings appearing on the scene. We humans are just a chance event, not a necessity.

Some say higher intelligence is necessary for the survival of the species. But that is nonsense. In the battle of survival, bacteria and cockroaches have been much more successful than most bipedal apes, bacteria have been around for more than 2 billion years, and cockroaches for around 300 million years, and nobody could consider these animals as intelligent and thinking. Even our closest siblings in animal kingdom, chimpanzees and gorillas, have been around as long as the humans and very successful in adapting to their environment.

What I want to point out here is that higher intelligence is just a chance win in a lottery and not a necessity in evolution. And from that I conjecture that intelligent life in universe must be extremely rare and sparse, not as some sci-fi fans believe, abundant. Even if by any chance another intelligent being has appeared in another remote corner of this universe, how successful can it be in the game of survival. Apart from all the environmental changes that can bring about the doom of the intelligent animals; in the millions of years before they achieve a civilization through a slow start, at the end, even if they survive and build a civilization, they themselves can strike the death blow. In our case, who knows how longer we human beings are going to survive on this planet. By piling up weapons of mass destruction(and I am not talking about one saddam Hussein here, but the real culprits, the sole superpower ) we might very possibly annihilate ourselves in a world war(and not only ourselves, but perhaps the whole planet), because our animal brains are still ticking wrapped in a tribal and herd level, while our weapons have come a long way from sticks and stones, and will be deadlier and more advanced by the day. We might destroy our own civilization and our own race in a world war, and this destiny can befall many other intelligent beings in other planets; if there are any out there at all. Higher intelligence, the one we humans own, most probably, is just a very rare by-product of evolution, a dead-end alley, a one in a million lottery win, and not a necessary stage or a tool for survival. Life has managed without it up till now and can manage to the end, when our planet is going to perish in the formidable glow of a dying sun.

Death and Man

Life is a stupid, aimless, chemical compound, like water, like salt, like any other crystal. It is inherently tragic, because it is meaningless and it ends in death. Every life is tragic, but human lives are more, because we are the only animal who knows that it is going to die and yet tries to live like there is no death. We go around our daily business with great enthusiasm, we battle for better life, for money and riches and love and sex and pleasure as if we are eternal. We deny death to ourselves. Death is always for others. Even if we try to understand death, our cells deny it and push us forward in this journey. Like a computer that is programmed to work endlessly and can't escape it's program, we run endlessly on the path to death and often forget to enjoy the beauties of the road.

And yet, at the end of the day, even Rockefellers and Genchizes of this world die and don't carry any of that wealth and power with themselves to the other world. Even they get the same as the next homeless guy at the corner of the street, a few feet of land 6 feet under for their bones. So why do they heave and try so hard and put so much stress and fear and anxiety and sorrow upon themselves while they know it is all useless? Why don't they take it easy like a fakir in India? What do they get out of all this anxiety and stress at the end of the day?

And yet.....

Reflections on church and Christianity

A few days ago, a friend invited me to their church and I sat through the whole mass. These are some of the thoughts that passed my mind:

1. How much cruelty and tribalism resides underneath the bible. The sermon was about Moses and how he let the Israelites pass through the red sea "and then the sea came together and drowned hordes of Pharaohs soldiers". Didn't those soldiers have wives and children like Israelites? Shouldn't they be pities, left to their own resources after the death of their fathers and brothers? No, god does not care about that. God is a "tribal" god! He only cares for the Jewish tribe. For him, like any other tribal guy, people from other tribes are not considered human, they are subhuman, even less than their own sheep and cattle and can die in anyway.

2. I look around, see some disabled people there. Why are you, of all people, here??? To thank god who has created you like this, who has inflicted perpetual pain and suffering on you? What is there to thank him for? One of my friends used to wonder about gay people who try hard to be accepted into the church and wage lengthy campaigns for that. He used to say: For what? To go to church to thank god to have created them as homosexuals and denied them one of the greatest pleasures of life which is the love and touch of the opposite sex?

3. they line up to have the wine and bread. Isn't it a totally tribal custom? The tribe's witch giving all sorts of strange things to people to eat and telling them it is the blood of that deity and this god? Weren't the Romans, and actually all prmitive tribes also, practicing these ceremonial sacrifices and drinkings of blood and flesh? Christianity has just changed it by a thin veneer of a religious story. Funny thing that Mormons have changed the wine into water and have water in their churches.

4. Thank goodness I don't need to accompany everybody else in singing the silly songs and standing and sitting every few minutes. Why can I do this, because millions of people have sacrificed their lives in the past hundreds of years so that I can sit there without having to follow the crowd and pretend that I believe and not afraid for my life.

5. The building is large but deserted. It has definitely seen better times, when everybody used to attend the chruch or at least pretended to believe and attended. There are a miserable small number of people here. I think of the power and glory of the church before. Alpha males at that times, used to be attracted to the church because of it's power and money, and as usual, wherever alpha males are, you can expect cruelty and deceit and war and torture and churches did not leave anything to imagination in that department. But now that they can't attract people and money, they are devoid of alpha males, here I can just see some weak soles smiling perpetually. Boy, I can smell the minister's smelly breath from here in the first row.

Immigration and Democracy

Most immigrants do it for financial reasons, not democracy and freedom. Give them enough money in their autocratic countries, and they won't move one step out. It is a rare immigrant that does it to flee dictatorship. When they come to the new democratic destination, they just strive for money and prosperity, they don't take part in the political process. That is sad but true. The risk the target country takes is that if it accepts too many of these immigrants, it might get flooded with people who don't care who rules them and what system is in power, as long as they can make a living. This will put democracy at risk.

Power of brainwashing, Christmas tunes in Dec

Don't you find yourself whistling and repeating the Christmas carols melodies and tunes in Dec? Aren't you irritated by these tunes that run endlessly inside your brain? Well, what is this except the huge power of brainwashing. If something is drilled again and again and again into you, it becomes part of your brain circuits and you can't get away from it.

In Christmas time anywhere you go, from the malls to the stores to the streets, you hear these same carols endlessly. In a short time, you find yourself repeating them endlessly in your brain.

Well, this is the simplest and easiest brainwashing. We human beings are very susceptible to this. Now imagine how a newborn kid living in a cult family environment can escape from incessant indoctrination in the family? It is just impossible. The "tunes" drilled into his impressionable brain are going to be played there forever. But same can be said about grown up human beings in many dictatorships.

First Nations(Indians) poor and begging in their own land

Many times in downtown Toronto you can see poor Indians, inebriated, dirty, homeless, begging for a cent. It is so sad to see these scenes because you know that if this land has an owner, it is the Indians not us new immigrants. They have been here for thousands of years and it is so unfair to see them begging from us newcomers on their own land, which has been conquered by us.