Sunday, June 26, 2011

It's just another manic Friday.


As a kid I the late 1990s and early 2000s, my family had a certain ritual. Nearly every Friday during the school year that my father was off, we would go to the Mall and have dinner at Friday’s. We would then go up and down the Mall going through the bookstores, toy stores, and video game stores. If it was rainy and I had just bought the most recent Sims expansion pack, it was the best Friday ever. It could only have gotten better if it was the Friday before a long weekend or vacation.

Things changed. Friday’s went downhill. For some reason, they changed their menu. I guess the popular meals were too popular so they wanted to give other meals a chance. My sister always got a honey mustard chicken sandwich, but they got rid of it. She needed to order a slightly similar meal but add and subtract many things in order for it to be the same. Being Friday’s, that was really hard. As per my understanding, the meals are premade and are heated up when ordered. I imagine a burger in a block of ice, plate included. Again, I do not know this for a fact.

The next time we went to the restaurant, most of the new items in the menu were “forced into early retirement”. No really, that is what was said in the menu. A sticker covered up the name of the meal with the words “forced into early retirement” written on it. I think over half of the items on the menu, were no longer on the menu. I think most people were disappointed as the restaurant was at half capacity for a normal Friday night. We no longer went as a family after that and it would be years before I went to another Friday’s again. It was sad as we had been such loyal patrons. My father had a Friday’s Reward card-thing that gave you rewards for eating there. We were probably close to getting the cruise (not really).

I guess we’ll have to go to other named-for-a-day-of-the-week restaurants.

It’s only been recently that I have been back there to eat. I really don’t care for it. As per most restaurants, I can never find anything I like so I get the appetizer chicken tenders or chicken wings. It’s usually chicken.

Understanding that I might need a little bit more to eat, I ask for a side of French fries.

No can do.

This might have to do with the meals-frozen-in-a-block-of-ice-thing or billing issues, but I could not receive French fries with my appetizer.

The solution? The waiter could “accidentally” bring French fries to the table and quickly walk away and hope he wasn’t seen.

Seriously, that is what he told me. I guess it didn’t matter though as he never brought me any during the meal.

What the Hell? If I go to Chili’s or Applebee’s, they would ask me if I wanted something extra, like French fries. “Are you sure you just want the Boneless Buffalo wings? You can get more to eat if you want. It’s not against the law.” But if I go to Friday’s, it’s like asking them if I could sacrifice a virgin on their table.

Although I’m sure there are laws against suicide. Zing!

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Scientific Experiments? Who needs that?


I understand why people believe in crap. Television programs whose intention is to properly inform us…don’t properly inform us.

I made a comment on Facebook about the History Channel and how they don’t objectively look at an issue (the Mayan calendar and 2012) and just perpetuate stupid beliefs.

OMG! 9/11 occurred on the day for “change”! The war in Iraq started on the day for “retribution” or “justice” or “some crap”! What kind of stupid conclusion is that to make, big events happened on randomly ascribed days?

Also the program stated that each 5,125 year cycle ended in catastrophe. We are nearing the last of five cycles (December 21, 2012…if you didn’t already know that). Were the Mayans even around for each of those cycles? How do they know that the cycles WILL end in mass destruction? They were thought to have been established between 2000 BCE to 200 CE, which means they were not around when any of the previous cycles ended. Why doesn’t the History Channel just explain to us that these are just MYTHS and that the calendar just predicts the alignment of the planets?

The worst offender was a show on Discovery Science (I think that was the name of the channel). It was about ninjas and their abilities. I caught the last part of the show discussing clairvoyance. For a channel with ‘science’ in the title, they were really bad at it. To ‘test’ this and to see if ninjas could possess such ability, they had ten people in a room. A mock raid was being conducted (used for an earlier part of the show) and they wanted to see if the participants could find the person hiding in the building. The only information they were given was a basic outline of the building with no details of the inner layout. They put them under optimal conditions for remote viewing (really quiet and really dark) and had them draw details about the hiding man, where he was, and what the building looked like.

It goes downhill from there.

The show mentioned how the Military spent millions on researching clairvoyance and remote viewing. They failed to mention that they WASTED millions of dollars and that the “psychics” had a horrible time locating things that could have easily been found using satellite imagery. Leaving out that part is a little deceptive to the audience.

They made a big deal out of the fact that half of the people knew the correct location of the guy in hiding. And by that, half the people knew the correct half section of the building he was located in.

The “+” was where people thought he was. The red “+” was where a person correctly located the man in hiding.

It’s really easy to say you had a 50% success rate when you start dividing up the building. 50% were right between two areas of possibility? Sounds like chance.

One person was spot on, but seeing how nine other people gave nine other locations, that sounds like chance again. They COULD run the experiment again multiple times, like a REAL scientific experiment, but one time is good enough for them.
 
Look! They were 90% correct!

Then they also made a big deal when some of the people knew he had “some sort of facial hair”.

The man had facial hair like this:


One person drew facial hair like this:

That is not similar at all. If the man had a handle-bar mustache and a person said he had only a soul patch, this show would probably make a big deal out of how correct they were. And is it really that far-fetched that a middle aged man would have facial hair? Of course not all people knew that he had facial hair. In fact, I think only about a third of the people guessed (yes I am using the word ‘guessed’ to describe this) that he had facial hair.

Oh, and at the end of that segment, a historian said that ninjas made up those abilities to make them appear more bad-ass. Gee, funny how that was crammed into the last five seconds of the segment.

This is why people believe in super-natural stuff like this. These programs deceive the audience so much by omitting certain facts and making conclusions based on chance and probability. They don’t do any real scientific experiment. They already came to a conclusion before their little experiment and brushed off that historian who actually knows what he was talking about. People, stop watching this crap. TV, stop producing this crap.

The Canadian Mother problem.

About a month ago I had a discussion on Facebook about a statement my father used to argue against illegal immigration and “anchor babies”. He gave an example of a Canadian woman who came to the US pregnant and gave birth in this country and then goes back to Canada. Should her child become a citizen? I posted on Facebook (you think I would disagree with him to his face?) that I thought it would be dumb to cross international borders if you were that pregnant and you wanted your child born in your country. A friend disagreed with me stating that her pregnancy shouldn’t have to interfere with her travel plans. After all, emergencies come up and funerals and weddings occur that you can’t miss. I didn’t think of that and she gave some good points. However, I still disagree with some of what she said.

There are three things I want to discuss about these arguments.

One, I still think it is stupid for a woman to cross an international border nine months pregnant for a silly reason. I can accept emergencies and funerals. I think people might understand why you can’t travel to these occasions, but if it is that important to you, I guess you can go. I don’t agree on frivolous things like vacations. If you did plan a vacation before getting pregnant and you become pregnant, cancel it. Travel locally. From what I got from my father’s example is that this woman has no intention of living in this country and she really wants her son born in her native land. Why would she risk that by going on an unnecessary vacation so far along in her pregnancy?

Plus, traveling while pregnant looks like a hassle. Also the health of the mother does come into play.

Point is, don’t cross international borders if you want your kid born in your country.

Two, there is a simple fix to this problem. All the mother needs to do is bring her child back to Canada and have them become a citizen. According to the official Canadian Government Website, a child under 18 can apply to become a citizen; if it is done by a parent or legal guardian, the child is a permanent resident, and one parent is a Canadian citizen. On the US side, I believe the child will lose their citizenship when they turn 18 and declare no intention of keeping their American citizenship. All the US has is a birth certificate on file and an unused Social Security number (which they can probably reuse). The child is not draining any resources from the government.

Finally, this argument has nothing to do with illegal immigration or “anchor babies”. Like I said before, this woman has no intention of living in this country. Immigrants DO want to live in this country and contribute. This woman will take her child back to Canada and will not drain resources from the US Government. An “anchor baby” is a child born in this country to immigrants with the intention of “anchoring” the family down in this country and make it harder to deport them. Again, this woman has no intention of living in this country, the child will not be a drain on resources, and the child will eventually lose their citizenship.

I don’t mind a debate on the 14th Amendment and if we should make exceptions to the “natural born citizenship” (to the example above). But don’t use the Canadian mother as an example of an anchor baby. It’s not.

Saturday, June 4, 2011

International EVIL Fund!

I already posted a response like this to my friend on Facebook, but I want to go into a little more detail.

My friend posted an article critical of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Although most of the criticism is valid, I disagreed with the author’s interpretation of the IMF’s motives. What I got from the article was that the IMF was founded by evil white guys whose only motivation was racism, greed and evilness. First world nations are trying to screw third world nations and keep them down. I think that’s a little over the top. Don’t get me wrong, there are evil organizations in the world; the KKK, Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and the Nazis (historic and modern). So, it is not outside the realm of possibility to have organizations whose motivations are evil. But I don’t think the IMF is one of them.

One of my main problems with this article is this paragraph:

To understand this story, you have to reel back to the birth of the IMF. In 1944, the countries that were poised to win the Second World War gathered in a hotel in rural New Hampshire to divvy up the spoils…They wanted to build a global financial system that ensured they received the lion's share of the planet's money and resources. They set up a series of institutions designed for that purpose – and so the IMF was delivered into the world.

One, the “countries that were poised to win the Second World War” included these nations:

 (Light and Dark Green: Allies. Yellow: Axis. Grey: Neutral.)

Or in other terms, 90% of the world. The article goes on to explain how the IMF has been harming multiple third world nations. Well, according to the article, the IMF was designed by the Allies to harm the non-Allies. Seeing how those third world nations didn’t exist yet and were at the time part of the Allied powers (mostly France and the UK), I don’t see how they were planning to screw them.

“So we the Allies, trying to screw the non-Allies, are going to harm the Allies”. That doesn’t make much sense.

The European colonial powers didn’t see themselves giving up their colonies any time soon (with the possible exception of India, which had a large independence movement dating back decades). Trying to set up an organization to harm countries not yet in existence seemed a little forward thinking for them.

Second, according to the article and its definition of ‘they’ being ‘victors of World War II’, the only nations the IMF were trying to screw were Germany and Japan (and a few minor nations like Bulgaria and Thailand). How did that work out? Oh, Japan and Germany are two of the three largest/most powerful members in the IMF.

It’s things like this that really bug me. Comments like this ruin any legitimacy this article had. If they can’t bother to pick up a book or look online to get their history right, they probably don’t understand this issue or are just heavily biased. Rereading that, I’m still in disbelief of what was said.

With that out of the way, my other problem has to deal with the supposed motivations of the IMF. To me, it looks like the IMF was created to get the World economy back on track after the war. Also, to help nations get on their feet and expand.

According to the author, they are evil.

I don’t think that is fair. Looking at all of the problems listed by the author, it looks like the IMF is incompetent. Like I said to my friend, organizations like this are run by bureaucrats with college degrees with no real world experience. Look at every friggin “Think Tank” in Washington. Six figured idiots with no basis in reality and politicians choose to listen to (and take money from) the ones they want to hear. They stick to some rigid ideology and make their decisions based on what looks good on paper. They don’t know anything about the nations they are trying to help and thus make uninformed decisions that end up hurting those they thought they were helping. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. They are not evil, they are just incompetent.

With that said, the IMF deserves to be criticized. The author of the article points out many instances in which the IMF made things worse for a country. No matter how much they are trying to help, good intentions are not enough. They need to do more to work with the country they are trying to help to better understand the problem. They have to stop demanding so many conditions and terms in order to help a nation. THEY NEED TO REALIZE PEOPLE NEED FOOD TO EAT!

The problem is when people portray them as some James Bond villain organization. When you talk of evil conspiracies, you turn off most people who want a rational argument. This is why Newt Gingrich can’t be President; he makes up enemies (Gay fascists? Really???) and claims they are this close to destroying everything you hold dear. Yes, criticize the IMF for their bad decisions and demand that they reform. Just don’t turn them into Skynet.