It’s the first day of the rest of your life

Hey, sorry – nothing profound here. I just love this song, which I somehow missed when it came out.

All your gods are myths

It occurred to me while I drove to work this morning that I no longer care to say that I am an atheist because there isn’t any evidence for the existence of any gods. Evidence doesn’t even factor into it. Of course there is no evidence for any god, but why would there be? There isn’t evidence for made up things. I have no interest in debating this with anyone or pretending that there is anything to debate.

We all know that…

• There isn’t enough water to flood the whole planet at once.
• No one can live for days in the stomach of a fish.
• Virgins don’t have babies.
• Stars don’t point out the positions of imminent births.
• Dead people don’t resurrect.
• Natural disasters aren’t the results of an angry god.
• And so on …

We do know that all of those kinds of things happened in myths. Now you can be like my extended family member who provides “scientifical” explanations for the things in the Bible, but who believes in it anyway, or you can be logical, and conclude that the Abrahamic religions are mythology and nothing more. Because that’s what they are. So are all the gods of all religions. We made them all up.

If stories contain elements that look just like myths, it’s because they are myths. It’s that simple. I will never again debate this with any sort of religious apologist. There is no point. Anyone who insists on bringing up their gods to me is simply not worth my time. When they do it at work, I can, of course, politely decline the debate. Online is another matter.

Not everyone knows this obvious sign that their neighbours are junkies, but they should!

Haha… Sorry/NotSorry about the clickbait-style title. I just couldn’t help it.

I was reminded of this one again the other day, and I thought to myself… Hmm… I’ve never really spelled this one out on my blog, have I?

We’ve all heard this, but probably not all made the connection. So… you’re trying to sleep, but your neighbours are talking incessantly, not loud enough for you to make out the words (thank goodness – it’s not likely they’re saying anything you need to understand and you might lose a few brain cells if you did), but rather what you hear is the distant sound of repetitious driveling mumbling monologue. Something along the lines of…

Speaker one: Womble womble murby moo, wobbity were murble flurb. Groomp grurbert hurbur haw, shluyrbur furble schlurkerted schlurmer wombelly wor. Murmurer morming habbery hoo, flerbert rurmer borm. Humbub hurmering hormering hoo. Mimble mimbering meemee mo.

Speaker two: Flurburb nurt?

Speaker one: Grimburb. Splurkert florg. Wombelly wee. Kurburble blorg. Burt twerdle kaflorgit. Nowert yurg! Spash!

These quotes best read with a mouth full of cheese

And so on… the whole fucking night. It could be a couple of people; it could be more. It could be a whole family of idiots or a house/flat where a bunch of strangers just hang around. It may be accompanied by someone clinking a lot of bottles together when taking out the trash, because people high on uppers can drink loads more than everyone else.

The fact is, sober people don’t do that – they don’t mumble loudly the whole night, and even alcohol alone isn’t a likely explanation these days. These people you hear talking shit the whole night are always high as fuck. We, humans, are social animals, and when we get together, we do talk. But people who are high don’t stop taking, long after most people would have. There’s also a particular way that men on meth tend to mumble along, womble-mombling for hours or maybe days on end. Hard for me to put into words, but it’s a way they sound on meth that I recognize instantly.

What you do with this information is up to you.

Some crazy dreams

For the last few years, I’ve had constant bizarre and vivid dreams. Usually I forget them, but for whatever reason, I remember bits of three of them from last night. Not the whole dreams, but enough to share in bemusement…

The chicken farmer nightmare

In this one, I found myself wanting to be a chicken farmer. I was loaded into the back of a van, what we call a “bakkie” here in South Africa, and taken to a farm. On the farm, I was not even given a room or a place to unpack my things, but immediately put to work, as some kind of slave laborer. Everyone there was Afrikaans, except for me, and I soon got into trouble by announcing “I’m not a fucking slave laborer” and also telling them I don’t believe in their god. It then turned into my generic “I need to pee but can’t find a toilet” dream, and also involved me getting a lecture from some strange woman about how I was being disrespectful to their culture.

The lucid “astral projection” like dream

In this dream, I found that I was able to both hear and feel myself breathing. I have a nasty post nasal drip and in this dream, I was aware that I was sleeping, and could feel the rough breaths going through my throat, and strangely also hear my breathing, but as if it was not me, as if I was disconnected from my body, floating above it but a separate entity.

This was interesting, because I do believe that astral projection is not real, but simply a form of lucid dreaming where the dreamer believes some nonsense about being a spirit. Perhaps the parts of the brain involved, the combination of subconscious and lucid parts somehow gives an impression of being two entities… the sleeping physical body and the mind feeling as if they are not the same.

Interestingly, I snore, but I didn’t hear myself snoring. I heard this loud and somehow “disconnected” (from me) breathing, and only remembered that I snore after waking up. So I must conclude that the breathing part was actual dream (not real), but a recreation of a breathing sound using my subconscious imagination, whereas the awareness that I was asleep and dreaming was the lucid part of my brain. Having the illusion of those two parts being separate was a fascinating experience.

The lucid time traveler

Having two lucid dreams in the same night is highly unusual for me, because I can’t usually maintain lucidity for more than a few seconds… So I was chuffed with this one.

This dream started with me seeing someone from my school days, in school uniform, with his hair blowing in the wind. But he was de-aged back to around 17 – this guy should be about 50 now, same as me. Then I saw several people from my school days, all in perfect detail, and in fact, I didn’t even know that I remember them all so well. I was myself as I am now, lucid but invisible to them, a time traveler observing them and their conversations, able to go right up to them without them seeing or otherwise detecting I was there. I was totally in control, lucid but not forced to awaken, able to look at them from different angles and move among them. Again, a fascinating experience in lucid dreaming.

The weird thing was, I was able to open my eyes, see my dark bedroom, and close them again to immediately resume the dream. So it was like I was simultaneously awake and asleep… hence my usual problem of waking up (and losing the dream reality) was not an issue.

Maybe I should find out more? Try to deliberately lucid dream. It really is quite amazing.

If you believe the meth voices are real, here’s a simple experiment that proves otherwise…

I’m over my meth addiction. Seriously. I have not been able to relate to my fellow addicts for a long time, but one thing that gets to me is that one of my most popular posts here, about meth voices and how they start, was hijacked by commenters who are absolutely convinced that the voices are real.

They come up with various explanations… Sometimes the voices are “demonic” (even though demons aren’t real), sometimes it’s some kind of government mind control (no such thing exists and moreover, your government have better things to do than watch a bunch of tweakers walking around their houses and hiding behind their beds), sometimes it’s the voice of Jesus (nope – also not real), and sometimes it’s some form of psychic powers (again – nope). But I don’t give a fuck what your explanation is…

This post is for you fuckers who think the voices are real. I have one simple experiment you can try, one that proves they originate from your own brains.

Control the voices

It’s pretty simple really… It occurred to me one day, in the midst of my worst paranoid experience where the voices were mocking and saying terrible things about me – if the voices were generated in my own brain, which they obviously were, I should be able to control them. Just focus on them and make them say different things. For example, if they’re insulting me, have them compliment me instead, or as I did while super high and out of my mind, have the main vocal “antagonist” shout out at the top of his voice, in between all the insults of calling me a loser and junkie and saying I would never clean up but probably die from my addiction, “I’m a bouncy bouncy bouncy ball; watch me bouncy bouncy bouncy FALL!” Just make them say random stupid shit.

And then, when you realize that you can control the voices, you will know for certain that they are not external. They are not real. They are auditory hallucinations, either brought on by your drug use or are part of a mental illness. And then… seek help.

Note that controlling the voices won’t make them go away. It can be a useful coping mechanism though – at the very least it could help you realize that they are internal to your own mind. There are other causes for hearing voices besides drugs like meth, but if you hear voices and are a drug user, I strongly encourage you to stop using drugs. Otherwise, you risk triggering mental illness and the voices becoming permanent. In my case, the voices stopped after I stopped using meth, or even when I took breaks from it years ago. Trust me, it’s better to get this sorted before you cross that line to being psychotic and delusional.

Cognitive dissonance is amusing

Firstly I must apologize… I don’t get time to write here much any more. But as I install a new laptop, I might as well write a little while I wait for the downloads to complete…

We have this application at work that someone else has been working on, an app to batch process a bunch of identification verifications for a third party. That is, given the ID number of thousands of people, determine whether they are valid identities, their marital status, deceased status, and so on. The people involved were having a discussion about optimizing it to first remove the ones we already have data on showing they are deceased. No need to reverify someone you already know is dead, I guess…

Of course, since it was just before the Easter weekend and all these people are Christian, I couldn’t help myself… So I was like… “How come you only have an alive and deceased status? What about resurrected? I mean, you all believe that resurrection is possible, right?”

They didn’t like my joke. Silly people.

But its a good point. You know that dead people don’t come back to life. But you also believe that one person did. That doesn’t make sense. It would be too easy for me to claim that deep down Christians know this shit doesn’t happen, and deep down they don’t believe… But that’s not how it works. That would be the same as my brother claiming that deep down I’m still a Roman Catholic. It would be projection. It’s easy to fall into that trap, to project our own beliefs onto others.

But real beliefs are more complicated. in reality, religious people can simultaneously know that resurrection is impossible, but also believe in the resurrection of Jesus. It’s stupid. And as long as you clowns believe in bullshit like that, this clown will mock you for it.

Happy Easter. Jesus didn’t resurrect because shit like that doesn’t happen. But I do believe in chocolate so I thank him for dying so that I may eat lots of chocolate.

Priest fired for saying the wrong magic words?

I wrote this post on Facebook last night and maybe it’s worth expanding here…

Earlier, Josh asked me to explain the definition of satire…

Funny how difficult it is (for me anyway) without looking it up. I explained it as using humour to criticize something, to mock it, and often using parody for the mocking part, which creates an equal but absurd criticism of the thing. So it uses humour but is really serious.

My example was telling him about that priest who was forced to resign because of 20 years of botched baptisms, because he said “WE baptize you in the name of Jesus” instead of “I baptize you…”, and that my parody of it was to write a status on here suggesting he botched the baptisms because he forgot to say “abracadabra”.

But it’s a great example, isn’t it? I mean, the more I think about it, the more similar it is. He didn’t say the right magic words in a meaningless ritual, and absurdly, the church now claims all those baptisms “don’t count”. It’s so fucking stupid, it almost parodies itself.

Imagine believing in such absolute fucking hogwash.

Here’s an article about that priest. The story is legit.

It’s even been commented on by Father Nathan Monk here… He’s a former priest but now atheist and writer as well as social media personality – one who often triggers angry Christians because he still uses the Father moniker. The thing is, he’s a qualified Catholic priest, so he an use that if he wants to. Anyway, his point is that the church isn’t playing by its own rules here… They allow any baptized person to perform a baptism in certain contexts, and accept baptisms from Christian converts of other Christian religions. So why be so hard on this priest? It’s fucking goofy.

This is what real hate speech looks like – part 2

I snagged this one two days ago – another example from that same group of bigots and a reminder to you that Facebook does not remove actual hate speech from its platform. This is once again transphobia, pretending to be something else.

This is what real hate speech looks like – part 1

Hey, it’s day 4 of the new year and I’m not banned on Facebook yet! Wowsers… here’s the thing… I’m normally banned for “hate speech” or “harassment and bullying”, when I respond to hate speech and/or harassment. Because responding to hate triggers the algorithms that detect hate, apparently.

So instead of responding there, from now on I’m going to call out typical examples of real hate speech that’s allowed on the platform whenever I see it. Hence the “part 1”. All posts like this one will be tagged hate speech.

As always, real hate speech is subtle enough that it doesn’t trigger algorithms. In this case, we have a Christian claiming that LGBTQ people are paedophiles. Specifically, it is targeting transgender people.

It’s often a Christian being hateful, but not always. It is almost always someone on the political right. Also look at the reactions… This is from a group that’s turned into an echo chamber for bigots. I reported it to Facebook, but I am willing to bet it the post will not be removed. They never remove real hate speech.

And by the way, if you agree with the meme, you’re trash. I hope you choke on a chicken wing or something.

We’re losing the war on misinformation and willful ignorance

We really are.

I’m going back to work today, after isolating due to covid-19. I got the new omicron variant (I presume), with symptoms so mild, I at first thought it was just a cold. And it looks like my prediction is on point… This variant is becoming the dominant covid variant. It’s taking over. That’s good. That’s great! The pandemic is going to fizzle out. Everyone who hasn’t had the disease will get it pretty soon now, and we will all have immunity to the basic virus, at least as far as getting seriously ill is concerned.

But there’s a flip side to this. I have an anti-vaxxer sitting right beside me at work. Nobody is mandating that he get vaccinated. Soon it won’t matter because we’ll all be immune anyway. I’m hearing about people winning their court cases for refusing vaccinations. Maybe it’s only hearsay? I fucking hope so but it really is starting to feel like we’ve lost the war on misinformation.

Welcome to the age of idiocracy.