Is there a problem with democracy?

Democracy is a great form of government. It gives 'power' to the people. Wahoo, how awesome is that! The funny thing is... a lot of people take that for granted. Many people can't be bothered voting in elections or can't even be bothered to read about politics in the news. This is odd because didn't our forefathers wage many wars and make many sacrifices to ensure that everyone had freedom, and to make sure that everyone; men, women, blacks, whites, gays, lesbians, jews, christians, muslims (the list goes on) were treated fairly and equally? Yes, well, I can recall some fighting about that in the past. And that is why we need democracy; to help ensure that those people in power represent the interests of the general population.

But is democracy really all that great? As Winston Churchill said, "democracy is the worst form of government- except for all those others that have been tried." So yes, democracy has its problems. For example, what would happen if there was a referendum on wheather we had to pay taxes? Of course, some people would vote in favour of paying taxes, but I wonder how many people in New Zealand would vote in favour of not paying taxes. Because isn't it 'uncool', or somewhat 'geeky' to want to pay your taxes - people would give you an odd look if you said you had a desperate urge to pay your taxes. (I heard there was a referendum in New Zealand which voted overwhelmingly in favour of not paying taxes which the government just ignored but I can not find any sources for it).

Anyhow, some people do not even bother to vote in referendums or elections. In my opinion, this is poor judgement. Sure, of course your vote probably won't make any difference. But it is your duty and responsibility as a citizen to vote. I would think of having to vote as the cost you pay for democracy and the freedom to do whatever you want (within moral limits). Because many people in the past sacricficed their lives just so that you could vote and have your say. Everyone has to at least show them respect by casting a vote. Otherwise politicians would not have to answer to anyone and they would become corrupt and you would eventually lose your freedom if no one ever voted as an ugly green monster called dictatorship (or DICK-tatorship) slowly appeared in your backyard.

But I don't really like dictatorship either. Sure, democracy has its problems but I'm willing to put up with it.

By the way, I realise this is a bit of a long post and that this is the first post I have written in just over two years. I am trying to test wheather I could work up a passion to be a magazine columnist.

Monkies

Monkies... Is that spelt monkies or monkeys? Cos I thought it was spelt monkies but that doesn't look right. Monkeys looks like a better spelling. Cos isn't there a rule that any plural for a word ending with "y" is finished with "ies" instead?

Anyway...
Something that amused me; a philosophical question that kept me pondering for days and the more i think about it the more new ideas or possibilities i think of for it.

Think about this

If you had an infinite number of monkies on type writers and there was an infinite amount of time, would these monkies eventually be able to come up with the complete works of Shakespeare?

At first I thought no way. But then I thought that if there was an infinite amount of time and an infinite amount of monkies then at some stage these monkies must eventually come up with something like Shakespeare, even if it does take them 2 million years to stop eating bananas and learn how to spell and use a type writer.

But then it came to my attention that after 2 million years, these monkies will have evolved and gone through natural selection processes (if you believe in evolution) and adapted to their own ecological niche. And then u need to realise that WE USED TO BE MONKIES! And us being homo sapiens did in fact come up with the complete works of Shakespeare, or at least, one of us did, Shakespeare himself, came up with his own complete works. And he evolved from a monkey. So then an infinite number of monkies with an infinite amount of time MUST indeed be able to come up with the complete works of Shakespeare.

This is hard to test through the scientific method. First of all we need an infinite amount of monkies. And we need an infinite number of type writers. But this is impossible. We can not have an infinite amount of anything as infinity is only an imaginary number. Therefore we will need a lot of type writers and a lot of monkies and measure their rate of progress towards writing the complete works of Shakespeare. We can grab a few monkies from jungles and zoos. And then we can measure how close the monkies come to writing the complete works over shakespeare over a period of, say, one month. This can then be divided to work out a monkey's exact number of words per second. Or it can be multiplied to extrapolate out in exactly what year the monkies would come up with the complete works of Shakespeare based on the progress of this sample group of monkies.

But then the technicality arises that if the monkies are now homo sapiens when they figure out Shakespeare, does this mean that we can not say that an infinite number of monkies with an infinite amount of time and type writers would actually be able to come up with the complete works of Shakespeare???

Or maybe I just have an infinite amount of time to come up with an infinite amount of thoughts.

I'll finish here.
P.S. I think monkies is spelt monkeys now. It looks way better.

That exam

It was the day before the exam. I was panicking; I had barely done any study the whole trimester and struggled to recall much of the lecture material. I smartly realised that my best chances relied upon hypnotising my examiners through subliminal suggestions carefully hidden within my exam script; much like Darren Brown on his T.V. magic mentalism shows. It would be easy; use terms like "A" to imply a high grade and use terms like "percentage increase" and "good", "excellent" and "outstanding" to subliminally suggest to whoever was marking my paper that I should get a high mark regardless of the large amounts of bullshit i wrote down. So I studied techniques of hypnosis for a good two hours.

I soon realised I would never get good enough to hypnotise anyone in the small number of hours I had left and since when should you believe anything you hear on T.V.?! So I bravely turned to my treacherous text books. Text books should come with a warning; "may induce drowsiness". I fell asleep within 30 minutes of opening my text book.

Next morning I woke up. Brain was hardly working. Scary thoughts went through my mind in strangely short sentences; "Oh Crud. Fell asleep. Exam soon. Must cram. Get ready. Forget Shower. Catch Train. Study. Cram more. Study. Cram more. Brain melting. Forget Brain. Just cram."

I finally got into my exam. My head was swarming with rehearsed sentences and formulae. I felt sick; sick from all the knowledge and information that I had just crammed into my head. I just wanted them to start the exam so that I could spew and vomit all this information out of my head and onto paper. And so I forgot all about my sneaky idea of using hypnosis to get a higher mark. I also forgot many of the pieces of information I had recently shoved into my head.

Disclaimer: This story is based on a true story :P

Do you believe in the paranormal!?

Last night I watched a tc program called Darren Brown:Mind Control. It was very interesting. He performed magic mind reading tricks like claiming he could see objects with his fingers, predicting how much money was in somone's wallet without the person themselves knowing how much money they had, and also convinced someone that they wanted a red BMX bike when in fact this very person had written down on a piece of paper that they actually wanted a leather jacket. Darren Brown claims that no actors or stooges were used at the start of the program and yet he says he is a big skeptic of the paranormal. I'm not really sure how he does it. Anyway today I spent 2 hours reading about hypnosis instead of studying for exams.

But just now one of my sister's friends has come over with supposed letters that a "psychic" wrote, translating messages from his deceased dad. And apparently it says things in the letters that only my sister's friend could have known and that had only happened recently.

Also recently i read in the back pages of a newspaper that a credible scientist had reported sightings of the Loch Ness Monster!?

In my psyc paper this trimester we looked at a possible relationship concerning a person's belief in the paranormal and their proneness to schizophrenia. Apparently there might be a strong relationship between the degree that a person believes in the paranormal and their proneness to schizophrenia.

Now I am unsure of whether I should believe in the paranormal or not. There must surely be some logical explanation for every "paranormal phenomenon".

Wondering how to plan my 21st

I have just started planning my 21st today 47 days in advance of my actual birthday on Saturday 30th June. Best that I actually plan one rather than just hope that I would get "surprised" by an apparently spontaneous birthday party that appeared out of thin air.

So I have been pacing frantically around the house like Sir Edmund Hillary climbing Mt Everest trying to decide how I want this party to be like. My main goal is to make it "the night I will always remember!" It will be hard to make it especially different to any other party that I've had unless I try include new things into it like have a pool table or table tennis table or invite new people or have fancy lights around the place. I also intend to have a better sound system. So I was hoping instead of using those crappy speakers in the lounge that threaten to blow if you turn them up full volume, I could use guitar amps hooked up to a stereo... although I would have to hope Phil would lend me his cable for connecting the amps to the stereo and that Chris and Stefan would be able to bring their amps AND that all the amps can be connected together to play the same thing...

Anyhow, another thing to hope for is good weather. Parties just seem a lot better when the weather's fine cos everyone's in a better mood. Not to mention there's more freedom to go outside and have barbeques and stuff. But seeing as I remember what the weather has been like on past birthdays, I'd say the weather wuold most likely be overcast and windy... stupid birthday being in the middle of Winter... But you could say any day in Wellington is most likely to be overcast and windy cudnt you!

Well that's the end of this post. I'll now go and cut and paste this on to every other blog that I have... -_-

Just don't order a sex on the beach cocktail...

Want to hear the most terrible joke ever? (I made this up by the way)

A man walks into a bar and orders a Sex on the beach cocktail. The bar-tender gives him a drink and he tastes it.

"Ew, yuck!" the man says. "What's in this drink?"
The bartender replies "salty water, sand and cum"
"But i ordered a sex on the beach!" shouted the man.
"And that's exactly what you got... just in a glass" said the bartender.
"Well who's cum is this in my drink?"
"The last man who came... he ordered a screaming orgasm"

Terrible huh?

Pointless Speculation

Here's a quick list of pointless speculation.

Today I bought a bottle of G-Force, mango and pineapple bite flavoured. But on the label of the bevrage it had a picture of a mango biting a pineapple. This didn't quite seem right to me as I instinctively assumed that "mango and pineapple bite flavoured" should mean that it would be the pineapple biting the mango. However, this is arguable. Feel free to argue about this to someone when your are bored.

Anyhow, another oddity that struck me when I purchased the drink with my wonderful New Zealand currency was that the drink was coloured green!!! Yes, that's right. Green! And we're talking pineapples and mangos here. Neither pineapples or mangos have anything to do with green... (unless you want to be pedantic and say the leaves on the pineapple could be green). So as I went to try and read what colouring was in the drink, I noticed it said on the label "want to know why this delicious Mango and Pineapple fruit drink is green? We wondered about that too." This just shows that they coloured it green because they needed to colour it something and orange colour was already taken up by the orange flavoured G-Force drink.

A little update on my recycling; I've managed to accumulate about 50 bottles over the past 3 months from drinks like lift plus, Frank, Primo choc milk, V, coke etc, and I've now put them in a plastic bag and are ready to be recycled on Wednesday which is "recycling day" around here in Normandale.