Sometimes you’d think that ‘we the people’ are in control since everything is rapidly becoming a popularity contest. Voters get to choose their political leader, consumers get to choose what products are on the shelves, fans get to choose their next idols. There are polls on everything and this also means that serious discussions can get cluttered and important decisions get made on the basis of uninformed opinions, fed back to us in incomplete and misleading questionnaire reports (”53% of population opposed to roundabout” usually means, 53% of online voters are not completely satisfied with the current plan of a roundabout for various reason and 47% of online voters don’t care one bit, which is a completely different result than the headline in your local weekly.)

Dutch artist and webdesigner Jacco van de Post has made a cool online application that let’s everybody vote
on the news. It would simply be the next democratic step to take; news we like can make it to the final and news we don’t like, gets voted out. If news is injected in us with this big hypodermic needle, than at least let it inject us with a big dose of ‘happy’ (or perhaps, ‘denial’).

Besides it being a clever comment on our voting addiction his work also comments on the media-age we live in. bringing news is one thing, but what if you only bring news that (potential) viewers don’t like? That would cost you loads of money from advertisers wouldn’t it? So clicking and voting would bring CNN (which is where the app gets its headlines from) valuable information which, I am sure, Jacco would be willing to sell to them for loads of money.

Start the application by clicking here.

Please read this post, you might win an i-pod. Upon reading this post, we will save your ip-number and store that data on our servers. We will combine that data with the information we will obtain from your internet access provider, which they are required to store for several months by our governments. Obviously, with all that data, on all those servers, it is easy to find a backdoor somewhere and get access to your websurfing information.

By snooping around your personal surfing data we will find out what your personal interests are and start sending you some tailored spam. So far, so good. Chances are also good, that we find out where you do your online banking. From your myspace page we will find out some essential data, like your date of birth et cetera, but do not worry. We are not thieves so we won’t actually get into your accounts. Not unless we have also found out that the way you actually made that money say… you are a an international money trader or something, is by stealing it yourself. In which case we will invest it in saving rainforests and educating children on your behalf. No need to thank us. With you accounts, date of birth, and address we are set up for obtaining your social security number. Luckily for us, your government will doubtlessly have all information we need to… erm… ‘own your arse’… linked to that one number.

This will save us a lot of needless hassle. Your credit-card details, your health insurance, the amount of super-saver points from the supermarket and the products you bought to earn those, if you have any debts, if you were ever active in politics, where you work(ed), who you called on your mobile phone, when and how long, when your drove your car past what toll-booth, who you talked to at the mall (unless that person is an unknown terrorist, obviously)… this information might all prove to be useful. We don’t know for what exactly, but rest assured. If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about.

The great thing about all that personal data that is so conveniently linked to each other is that it provides jobs for government officials, nothing else. And it helps fight terrorism. And should you ever recover from a coma and suffer memory loss, isn’t it easy that your government can tell you all about your old life? From your favorite restaurant to your usual brand of undies. Storing and combining data is great!

But we lied about the i-pod. Sorry.

The book ‘primates and philosophers - how morality evolved’ by professor Frans de Waal tries to explain to the reader how ‘morality’ is not a unique human trait, but something that evolved. Various forms of morality can be found in other species and, not surprisingly, the nearer these species get to human species, the more evolved their sense of moral gets. That’s the basic idea. I won’t get into details about the book and whether it’s any good or not (I liked it though), if you’re interested in that, go and have a look at the Amazon reviews or something.

What I was triggered by was something de Waal wrote in between making two points about the central mater of moral: Is it ridiculous for animals to have rights? It seems to me that De Waal thinks so, because he started with something of joke in which a Gazelle was suing a leopard for chasing her. Also, he made the point: if it is okay for a fox to eat a rabbit, why should it not be okay for me to eat a rabbitThe afterthought to that would be: if it is okay to eat a rabbit to keep you alive, why would it be wrong to do medical tests on animals to keep you alive? Since I believe that De Waal is a smart man, I think it’s safe to conclude that these are thoughts shared by a lot of people, and not just the stupid ones.

I am no attacking people that meat. Nor is my central point here that it would be wrong in all cases to perform medical tests on animals if it will save human lives. I have a opninion on those matters, but I won’t bother you with that right now. What I am saying here that even if you are in favor of medicak tests andeven if you truly believe humankind consists of carnivores; that’s not an argumant to want to set up legislation for human rights. And the way I see it; it shouldn’t have to be all that difficult (De Waal seemed to think it wold even be impossible).

Shouldn’t the central point of universal human rights simply be:

And I honoustly do not believe that that’s naive. Obviously there will a lot of small matters that lawyers and legal experts need to sort out, but they’ll work it out in the end. If we, humans, have such a strong sense of morality, it should have to be that difficult to agree with such a rule of thumb. And if you are absolutely convinced that you have to have your pork sausage, steak or bacon… at least give those animals a happy life.

Travelling from home to work takes me about an hour. Since I am a smart person, I don’t commute by car, but I take the comfortable, quick and reliable train. Add all those ingredients together and you get a good recipe for ‘time to read and think’. I usually get my best ideas in the morning, when I’m not yet fully awake. Sometimes I just ponder about trivialities or ‘deep philosophical questions’… Anyway, this morning I was thinking about the following:

“Most people think it is very funny and naive when certain cultural groups believe they can bring the rain upon performing a rain-dance. Or they can have a successful harvesting when offering rice to a stone-statue. Or they can have a male child when they run around an old oak-tree in their naked bum when the moon is full.
However; we tend to take people seriously that believe they can improve the health of an ill person they do not know by praying to a personal god that listens to all prayers and acts upon them. They believe so, even when all scientific research ever conducted has proved that this has no effect at all (not for the ill person anyway).”

So, why do we take one, erm… ‘outlook on eternity’ seriously and make fun of others? And not even the people that are deeply religious themselves, but so called non-believers or ‘infidels‘ as well. Why do we have more respect for -say- ‘christians’ than for people who claim to believe in the flying spaghetti monster? (there is no doubt in my mind that there are some Pastafarians that take their religion seriously by now… otherwise; how did scientology start?).

And if we agree that we should treat all religions alike, no matter how obscure, should we take all religions seriously or should we all make fun of one another? ‘Making fun’ would get my vote. If, however extraordinarily unlikely, there should be a god ‘up there’ somewhere, I am sure he/she/it has a great sense of humour (again: How else can you explain Scientology?).

Hello reader, do you have internet access at your work? Then you are probably a thief. A couple of weeks ago (yes this is old news, but hey: I have a life too…) the very creative accountants at Ernst & Young calculated that the average employee spends five and a half hour per week on all sorts of personal stuff during work hours. I only know for sure that this information applies to the Netherlands, but we’re usually not much worse than the rest of world. And since you’re probably reading this posting at work yourself… who are you to judge, right?

E&Y has a VP for ‘ICT Leadership‘ (that guy must be AMAZING at excel sheets, the music on their website is pretty cool too) a mr. J. Verschuur and I say him on the news saying that ‘workers that do personal stuff while at work are thieves’. Working at a large accountancy firm I think it is safe to assume that he knows a thing or two about theft. So, what should we do know, corporate monkeys? I say; block all and every site that resembles anything like ‘gmail’, ‘myspace’, ‘wordpress’ (yes, that one too) and let’s all start staring at those excel sheets again, for eight hours a day.

Or, in case you have missed the irony, we can conclude that E&Y are idiots and mr. Verschuur a bit thick. I am not always this cool and talented blogging, visual artist. Three days a week I have a regular job (at an NGO, I’m still credible…) and my employer seems to be very happy. I do what is asked of me -and a little extra-, I don’t mind to be called during my ‘days off’ for a quick question, and I have become very handy at working with computers. Which is good, since at our offices we don’t have an IT person, and I can solve a lot of problems for my colleagues. Last weekend I was thinking about my NGO-job for almost two entire days because some nitwit at a conference we were supposed to be attending f-ed up and I wanted to solve things.

I would like to welcome E&Y to the twenty-first century. A lot of employees nowadays, especially the ones that have creative or communicative jobs (so perhaps not accountants) have a very thin line between work and their private life. Those couple of hours during the week I spend on last.fm, flickr.com or imdb.com I easily make up for during the days that I’m painting or blogging.

Oh, and in case my boss is reading this as well… it’s my day off today.
And in case you’re an E&Y employee; stop losing those laptops…

Dear prof. Dawkins,

I have really enjoyed reading your book ‘The God Delusion’. The way you have argued that it is both highly unklikely as highly undesirable that a personal God exists, is very convincing. Not suprisingly, the main ammunition you use to shoot holes in religion comes from the theory of evolution. Also, as to be expected, a lot of your attention is directed towards one of the most religious western countries: the USA. It appears that you think religion, or: believing in a supreme being, is a bad thing for the USA, the most powerful nation in the world, as well as for the rest of the free world. I think it is not and I would like to explain why.

You may have heard the stories, which may well be urban legends, about a man who put his wet cat in a microwave oven to ‘dry it off’ and got a lot of financial compensation from the manufacturer because they did not state in the manual that a microwave oven was not intended for such use. Or a woman who got financial compensation from a fast food chain because she pilledtheir hot tea over her leg which hurt quite a lot. I also heard of a traveller that slipped on a wet floor at an airport, broke a leg, then sued the airport and is now a millionaire. There are a lot of these stories around, undoubtedly some of them are true. The basic idea of alle these financial compensation stories seems to be: stupidity pays. Not everyone that sues for financiel compensation is stupid ofcourse, but a lot of times… stupid people get rewarded.

I think you can, quite roughly, describe ‘evolution’ as; the traits of a species that are most benificial to this species will be passed on and amplified to future generations of this species. Should that indead be the case, and if we can assume that on the basis of the above examples we may conclude that it can be very benificial to be stupid, would the theory of evolution not say that we, Westerners, get more stupid with every generation? This cannot be true, can it? (Please note that it is not my opinion that everyone in free world countries are stupid, I am merely pointing out that it seems stupidity -like putting your pet in a microwave oven- is rewarded and therefor is a desirable trait. ).

If there is a God up on the skies looking down on us, personally creating each and every individual and granting parents the honour of having this Godmade person born into their families, we would not be getting more and more stupid at all. There could be a divinely set level of stupidity/intelligence. You also wrote about cases where a placebo can have as much effect as the actual medcine. So, suppose that the evolution theory is true and there is in fact, no God. Could we then, perhaps, let our religious brothers and sisters believe that there is a God after all? If only for their sake? For their mental health? Their self esteem? How do you think they would feel if we found out that with any passing generation we are getting dumber, all because of Charles Darwin.

I hope, with this short message I will have helped in making you see the light. If you do insist on providing clear scientific evidence there the can be no God, it might very well be that you get sued by a believer.

Sincerely yours.

There are people that feel that a free society means that we should be able to say and do everything we want, anytime we want and anywhere we want. We should, for example, be allowed to have sex in the streets. I have actually read some columns by respected authors that were defending that view. Nonetheless, I can only disagree and not because of all that ‘great freedom comes with great responsibility’ blahblah.

I do agree that what you do in your own home is your business. As long as you don’t hurt anyone; I don’t care, sculpt midgets out of carrots, dip them in chocolate pudding and shove them wherever you like. But the streets are, if you’ll excuse the very contemporary phrase, public domain. No matter how ‘free’ a society is, in a public domain you need rules. And one of those rules should be that you don’t have sex in the streets. And no: I don’t think that’s a very conservative view on my part. Fact remains that there are people that find the idea of being confronted with people having sex very offensive. I must admit that there have been an occasion or two where I would not have cared for that sight myself. So, if we were to allow people to have sex in the streets, that would mean that freedom was stolen from them, those innocent passersby. There is no way for people to be able to avoid having to see others having sex if all that sex was going on in the streets. You need to get out and do some shopping once in a while don’t you? Therefor I agree that it should remain illegal to do so

Away from sex, on to mobile phone conversations in the public domain. This week alone I have heard someone break up with her boyfriend, I heard about someones grandmother that wet her bed and how her granddaughter is really tired of having to go see her and I overheard someone complain about the receptionist at work (apparently she is a complete bitch). I can imagine people taking offense to being confronted with all that personal information as well. And if your travelling in a crowded train like I do everyday, a lot of times it is quite impossible to simply ‘go away’ and avoid it. Luckily I enjoy a bit of sleazy gossip, so I don’t mind terribly, but that’s beside the point. Should ’speaking out loud into a mobile phone in public’ be banned as well? Don’t the same rules apply as when it comes to having sex at the bus-stop, or at the grocers?

I guess not. People speak. And some people have no shame whatsoever. And even though I don’t consider the three people in the examples above as very civilised human beings, they’re merely having a conversation they could have been having with a person sitting across them. Perhaps they would be speaking a little less loud then, but still. I wouldn’t want to ban any subjects from being discussed, ever. And there are already rules about the amount of noise you’re allowed to make. And -more or less- normal speech is well within those boundaries.

As far as I am concerned, you can’t have sex in the streets, but at least you talk about it on your mobile phone. Isn’t freedom wonderful?

Ever tried to copy a Disney product? If you did, hopefully you have a couple of great lawyers standing by. The company that made afortune on copying fairytales as Snowwhite will have ‘none of that’. They figure: we thought it up, we designed it, if anyone’s going to make a buck of it… it’s us. Is that so unfair? Perhaps not.

What about a company that takes the genes of corn, a product that has evolved over millions of years and modifies it a bit. Nature still did 99,99% of the work but some science geek did something to it… does that mean this company ‘owns’ that corn? Can they actually deny farmers the right to grow that corn?

What about a company that builds a waterreserve in natural stream to purify the water. Does that company ‘own’ the water?

Ownership is a strange thing. by the way, the image I posted with this article isn’t mine…. I didn’t even ask permission.