Fact Check

The difference in the Internet and television is similar to the difference in science and religion or politics. The latter in each comparison do not like contradiction. While science and the Internet encourage it. They even provide the tools to do so. Do not like the theory or opinion you have just read? Fact check it. Conduct your own experiments. Take thirty seconds to Google it and read everything there is to know. There is hope for anyone to think logically and independently, some of the greatest thinkers throughout time have done so with as little exposure to mass-information as pre-public library days had to offer. But now the age of communication is upon us. Anyone can spend an evening online and completely revolutionize their entire belief system. By the time generation Y is in charge of the planet, a lot of bullshit will be cut out of our daily lives. We grew up on the Internet. We grew up on correcting people constantly. We are the generation of instant fact checking. Our parents might buy into mainstream news' propaganda, but we will not have it. Doubt is the most important feeling for us to act on. If the first things you are taught are the only things you ever allow to be considered for truth, you are only inviting ignorance.

The second we lose even the slightest hint of our freedom online, we are narrowing the gateway to total liberty.

Protect the Internet.

Protest any Censorship online. 


Do not just question Authority, question everything.

Inspire the Movement

This is a call to arms, an open invitation, a plea. The world needs you. It needs all of us, to act upon the mind's desire. It needs us to be free. The ease at which we live in a technologically advanced society has allowed us to become relaxed. We do not fight for our survival. Food and shelter are now catered to us as basic standards of living, making things like social entertainment one of our top priorities. Money is now at the center of our thought process for almost every life decision. Money is. Something that we made up. People hold this portrayal of an imaginary value so highly that lives are ended over it. Countless lives. Entire wars are waged in the name of the money god. The hierarchy of wealth and power has given birth to a people who destroy anything to quench their thirst for more of the same; wealth and power. Somewhere along the line human beings became disconnected from the natural order of things. Generally speaking, we do not think of ourselves as animals. We have lost touch with our biology to the point that we are convinced that the world and everything in it is here to serve us.

Every single bit of knowledge that we have was hard earned. Every revolution to date, be it political or ideological, was a right of passage for mankind. It took billions of years for life on Earth to evolve a mind that can even come up with such abstract thoughts as money. Now here we stand in the age of communication, sometime just after a technological revolution. It has never been easier for these minds to be heard. The species that incorporates this technology into its existence, while very old, is still adolescent. We still have primal instincts. The interconnection that we have gained is a toy to us, and this toy is the one thing that could be used as the most powerful tool to ever exist. Before the age of communication Democracy showed the world the most effective way for government to represent the desires of it's people, but now it is time for people to show the world that we can finally be our own masters.

No matter what that means to you, it is more important than you could ever imagine. This is the only world that we have got, and when you're done with it, you're children will take over where you left off. The land, the air, the governments, the knowledge, the experience of life and culture and love and laughter and every single complex human emotion and the most basic animal urges we all have... happen right here. We have seen the worst, most destructive things that man has to offer, and we have seen the most suppressive, dictatorial leaderships that have abused their power. We yearn to be free. Truly free. The way that we were when we were wild. We can have society and freedom too. We have always been more powerful than the establishment, that's why we're called the majority. And now we have the ability to communicate and spread the ideas that will make it all possible.

Let us remember that we are animals. Animals that are smarter everyday than we were the day before. It is no wonder that we have become disconnected from our roots. We really are the most special and cogent animal of them all. So, we are in this alone. Only humans can do it. We can create a world that is equal, and just. Go spread the word. Whatever you think that word should be. Start a blog. I am begging you. Make a film. Tweet about it. Share links, pictures, and articles. Use your voice and help to create the most powerful force that has ever been known, yet that has been here all along. Us.

Do not just question Authority, question everything.

A Dose of Perspective

Think about the immensity of the universe. Our planet is the home of nearly 7 billion people, trillions of other animals, and every single life sustaining resource we all depend on. Still, Earth is a very small, insignificant looking spec amidst everything else suspended in time and space. It revolves around a star that could fit one million Earths inside of it. That star, our Sun, could fit in the largest known star 70 quadrillion times. That's two decimal places larger than hundred-trillion. Next to it, the Sun looks like a single pixel on a computer screen. VY Canis Majoris, as it's known, resides right here in the Milky Way Galaxy. With billions of galaxies in the known universe, and likely billions more we are not yet able to see, it is almost certainly not the largest star in existence. Stars like VY Canis Majoris and the Sun are only two of an estimated 200 billion to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way. Not to mention that each galaxy is separated by tens of thousands of light-years. Earth is nothing more than a subatomic partical of the universe. Doesn't that make you feel like one of  Dr. Seuss's Whos, floating around on a single spec of dust or a snow flake? The word insignificant doesn't even come close to describing to how all of that makes me feel.

Europa

Mankind's ego has been in a constant state of check ever since Nicolaus Copernicus popularized the idea that Earth is not the center of the universe, and rather that it revolves around the Sun. Discoveries like that just keep coming and changing the way we think about ourselves. One demotion after another, Earth is now holding onto one of its very last attributes that makes it the most special spec of them all. That is, of course, being the only dwelling place of life. Some scientist still believe that, if not now, then perhaps at some point life could have existed elsewhere here in our own solar system. Maybe on Mars. Maybe on Jupiter's moon, Europa, which appears to have a surface made entirely of ice. If lifeforms, even single celled ones, are there then they are probably just about everywhere. If intelligent lifeforms are ever found, or if they ever found us, our ego would just be crushed. But, it could happen. Maybe. We want so badly to be the only or the most important or the best. The chosen ones. However, when all of the incredible numbers about the sheer size of the universe are closely considered... that odds are against it. There are even such lofty ideas as our entire universe being confined inside of a single electron that helps to make up some organism larger than what we could ever even comprehend. No matter how crazy thoughts like that sound, they are important to put our existence in prospective.

Even in the face of such overwhelming knowledge there is a place for optimism. We are not as small as it gets. Remember that 200 to 400 billion stars that share the Milky Way with us? Well on November 2, 2009 National Geographic said "Each cell in the human body contains about one hundred times as many atoms as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy." Oxygen, the most abundant element in the human body, has 8 protons, neutrons, and electrons. Those electrons are nearly 2,000 times less massive than the protons. Now it is believed that electrons might be made up of even smaller particles. So really, humans are somewhere in the middle row of the universe's class picture. Maybe we are kind of significant.

Bulgarian astronomer, Dimitar Sasselov pointed out in his speech at a TED convention in 2010 that while in terms of size and location we may not seem very important, in terms of time we are not so minuscule. It's projected that the entire universe is about 14 billion years old, and Earth has been sustaining life for around 4.5 billion of those years. That's not really all that young. Very noticeable the timeline of everything, and that's enough for me.

Not too hot, not too cold: The Goldilocks zone

Besides, think about all of the things that had to go just right for humans to even be here right now. Aside from being the perfect distance from the Sun for liquid water to exist, there are countless other factors that have went into our survival. If the massive meteor that ultimately killed off all of the large dinosaurs, and forced the little guys to downgrade into birds, hadn't hit Earth, mammals would have never had a fighting chance. We would have never walked upright, developed frontal lobes or opposing thumbs. We wouldn't have created written languages, art, sports, cars, Nike shoes, nuclear bombs, chewing gum, or government. We owe our everything to a lot of different stuff. We may have been put here by God to be his chosen ones or by the wonders of science to join the ranks of many other lifeforms scattered throughout the cosmos, and maybe it was some mixture of the two; whichever way, it is nothing short of a miracle.

So, no matter where we are or how small we are, we're still pretty important. Which makes our home planet and everything we do on it important. Let's start prioritizing things around here. It's time to live for a cause, and not for money or pride or material happiness. We have been here long enough, and have became so smart that we can see these things. We know that we're made out of countless, tiny particles. And we know that we are one of countless, tiny particles that make up the universe. Humans are right in the middle, and as far as we know we're the only one of those things that is aware of itself or of the others. That's pretty cool. Let's strive to be the very best humans we can be. Worldwide. We could achieve the most equal society in modern history.

Do not just question Authority, question everything.

Oil and the Slippery Slope We're On

Finite: having limits or bounds. It's opposite, slightly more recognizable: infinite. Why is it that the word infinite is used so much more in writing, television, and day to day conversation? It's sensationalized by our culture. There are car manufactures, radio services, insurance companies and an entire onslaught of other corporations who take their name from it. The ever expanding universe. To infinity and beyond. Forever and ever. It's all around us. Yet, the idea of anything being completely limitless and without bounds is impossible to even understand; to truly understand. Nothingness and infinity are both outside of what the human mind can comprehend. Things of a limited supply, however, are all around us, and are completely tangible. They're just not as fun to talk about. But a total exhaustion of any major resource could take a major toll on our way of life. Especially when at the core of our entire economic system is one of those finite resources. Oil.

We will run out of oil. There are no more dinosaurs to replenish it; and we just don't have the time. We use it way faster than it generates. Peak oil has already been passed. We will never extract as much crude oil from the ground as we were in 2005. We're at the top of the mountain, and it is a slippery slope. So, we'll have to start driving electric cars. Whatever, hippie. Right? Unfortunately it's just not that simple. In 2009 almost 60% of the electricity generated in the U.S. was made with fossil fuels. Nonrenewable. Another 25% was made with natural gas. Also nonrenewable. Wind, solar, geothermal, and hydroelectric dams made up less than 10% combined. Essentially, electric cars are running off of fossil fuels, and so are your lights, your televisions, and your cell phones.

It doesn't stop there. Gasoline is just one of many casualties. Amongst the others are plastic, latex, synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. Think about all of the plastic you have in your house. What about our medical supplies and individually wrapped food? What about food in general. Those petroleum based chemicals are what allow us to achieve such high yielding crops. At the same time they are poisoning the land making it useless for the near future. Oil is not only what sustains our population; it is what allowed it to get to such a large, overcrowding number in the first place.

It's time for another Renaissance. Science knows better than to continue on the path we are on and culture is catching up. I think the reason the first Renaissance was so great and lasted so long is because those people didn't just change the way they thought, they changed the way they educated so that the future would be changed for the better too. We have to change the way we teach. The importance of infinity has to be replaced with the importance of conservation and appreciation in our entire way of life. If we allow ourselves to destroy our own economical backbone we will suffer great consequences, possibly a total collapse of out current system. Nothing still in comparison to what is happeng to our ecological system.
We have to replace all fossil fuel technologies. Even if they weren't inefficient and harmful and expensive, they still wouldn't work. They cannot keep up to our growing demand forever. Why wait until we absolutely have to make the change. Faze them out now. Other options are not yet fully realized between a lack of research, funding, and suppression to protect corporate profits. But there are many that show promise. Synthetic silk in place of plastics. It's made from only protein and water. Personally, I think the only logical answer for power is the Sun. After all it is the sole provider energy to every organism on this planet, either directly or indirectly. Biomass fuel power is also very promising.

We can do this. We can do it better than any other group of people in history could have, because we have the internet. We can share these ideas. It has to be made clear; oil is not the choice of our generation. We don't care how much money and convince is at stake. There is a lot of momentum fighting against us, but we are young and anything is possible.

-The film “Collapse,” a documentary focused on American author, Michael Ruppert, brought my attention to a lot of this information. Collapse is available on Netflix. I strongly suggest it.-

Do not just question authority, question everything.

A Problem with Authority

From your earliest available memory, to the moment you left school or work today, you have been programed to follow the rule of your superiors. You were taught from day one that you shouldn't challenge your parents' authority because no other reason than the fact that they are your parents... And those are the rules. Then in school you were told that those rules apply to your teachers, and the principal. You learned about government; city, county, state, and federal, The United States of America, The Constitution, and all of these other things that you're not allowed to question. Above all you learned that you do not question God, or your religion. Questions are looked at like signs of doubt and doubt is labeled blaspheme. I remember from when I was young, wanting to know what God is and how "he" got here. I was scared to even let myself think about the possibility of God not existing for too long. I thought I would be sent to hell. Being scared into a belief system is not an honest source of dedication.

When I got older I started to consider all of the possibilities. I think that Carl Sagan said it best when he posed the question: What happens when two gods claim the same title? It leaves us to assume that one of them is false. If one is, then isn't it possible that another is, or that all of them could be.

God is basically thought of as the sole creator of time, life, and the universe through supernatural means. Supernatural is defined as anything that is attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature. In the Bible God is specifically credited for creating Earth and later making man, in his image.

The Big Bang Theory, God's number one opponent, is scientifically measurable. When Edwin Hubble discovered that other galaxies were moving away from us, it became safe to assert that they were once closer, and that at one time they could have all started from the same point. A common misconception about this theory is that there was nothing, then there was an explosion and Earth, the Sun, all of the stars, and everything else just popped out. It's much more complicated, however. Using an equation that took the speed of the galaxies that are moving away from us to calculate how long ago the Big Bang would have happened, scientists have figured the universe to be Fourteen billion years is how old. Earth came just four and a half billion years ago. Particles coalesced for millions of years before the first supermassive stars were formed. Later when those unstable giants went supernova, the materials that would create rocks, solid planets, and all known life forms were created. Those planets took millions of years to to coalesce too.

That is a very basic understanding of the modern scientific answer to how the universe was made, but their answer for how man got here is less measurable, mathematically, but is much more observable. Evolution is underestimated in both its complexity and how long it has taken. This isn't Pokemon we're talking about here. Monkeys didn't just wake up one morning and shape shift into humans. Natural selection and survival of the fittest is the most powerful of evolution's tools. Selective breeding, an intentional version of natural selection, is used all of the time by humans to make the most efficient race horse, and different breeds of dogs made to be the best for one specific job. Over time all animals, including humans, participate in natural selection by creating offspring with only mates that have what they see as suitable genetic traits. The other major method, survival of the fittest is even more obvious. Animals adapt to what challenges their environment puts in from of them. Animals do not evolve unless survival is at stake. Life on earth is estimated to have first developed at least as early as three billion years ago which seems to allow enough time for it to complexify to the point it has.

Looking at all of this information like a high-school current event assignment: what happened and when it happened, seems to be answered, in regards to the Big Bang. How it happened is a little more complicated, and is simply just not understood yet. Why did it happen is perhaps the most elusive of these questions.

At this point, crying "God" at any unexplained phenomena, like the Big Bang, and then pushing back what he is responsible for at each new scientific discovery seems as much like a cop out as crediting God for thunder and rain before we understood weather. However, the fact of the matter is that the creation of time, life, and everything, is not yet explainable. As of now it has caused by a force that is beyond scientific understanding, so it is super natural. If we began to, as a society, look at God as the force that caused the existence of our universe and not as a man who judges you and is willing to have you tortured for all of time if you don't follow his rules, we will be able to live by morals that are best for all people, and not just what we are scared into. If these boundaries are broken in our most basic rule systems then all the others will follow shortly. Even the fear of governments will fade.

Do not just question authority, question everything.

An introduction

In short, some time ago a study was done over a group of primates living on a Japanese island where one said primate was taught to wash sweet potatoes before it ate them to improve its taste. Soon this behavior was observed and learned by another monkey. Now with two of them using this process it had twice the observational power. Two more monkeys learned to wash the potatoes. Then four, eight, sixteen, and so on until a critical number was reached, allegedly around one hundred, then suddenly the rate of growth was so great that virtually all of the monkeys on the island were washing their potatoes before they ate them. Interesting enough. But the true value of that story is almost poetic. It is an incredible testimonial for the power of exponential growth.

Whether we like it or not, we the people have inherited quite a heavy work load. As cliche as it may be, "With great power comes great responsibility." and perhaps one of the most powerful and unstable forces known to modern man is the current status of technological advancement in communication and global connectivity. Our responsibility then, is to use that power wisely. All of us twenty-something-year-olds are like the graduating class of Facebook high. The age of communication is upon us, and it is such a beautifully unique time to live in. Ideas can grow and spread faster than ever before. Cell phones and the internet gave birth to this massive wave of chatter, and it only seems to be getting larger. And faster.

Anyone, from the typical stoner-conspiracy theorist to world renowned members of the science community, are weary of human life as we know it coming to an end. I'm not talking about December 21, 2012 or any other mistranslated doomsday prophecy, but rather a self-destruction of sorts. Capitalism, Communism, Socialism, Marxism and any other economic or political idelism all have one big flaw in common. None of them acknowledge the fact that our Earthly resources are finite, or not unlimited. We live in a system that relies on constant growth. I am fairly confident that I could explain our current monetary system to my six year old nephew and he would know how bogus it is. There is a reason so many people are getting involved in the Occupy Movement. Corruption is visible all around us and the separation of wealth is, honestly, fucking scary. But the same thing that empowers the masses to assemble and communicate these ideas at the ease in which we enjoy them, is the same thing that hurts us in a way. Because anyone can start a Facebook event and organize a demonstration in the name of Occupy, there is a lack of definitive leadership. There is no single voice to declare the demands of the people, and frankly there isn't really a clear answer, at this point, to what change needs to take place.

So, what can be done? Optimism tells us that every single person can make a difference, but the overwhelming size and complexity of major social issues makes almost any action seem futile. I have never known a more depressing notion than the feeling of not being able to make a difference. So I am constantly on the search for a call to action. All I can say for certain is that we absolutely have to use the tools we have at our disposal. Use your voice. Have the conversations. Do not just challenge authority, challenge everything. Aside fron causing a lot of controversy The Invisible Children's campaign for Kony 2012 did one other thing, and it was exactly what it had set out to do. Joseph Kony is now infamous, and the results of their social experiment tell us that we can make exponential growth the age of communication work for us. We can use them to help steer our ever progressing timeline in the direction that is best for humanity. This blog is nothing more than an attempt to help encourage a much needed revolution of the mind and to help reach the 100th monkey, so to speak. Answers are out there and we can only find them by looking.