Andrew Klavan

Was trolling one of my other blogs the other day, and found this. If you like his style, he does these every week or so. He writes books too.



Thought y'all might appreciate this sort of thing.

Tweeting in our Prime Minister's Ear

That's right folk, I finally succumbed to twitter... Time to see what all the fuss is about.

Nov 6, 11am - I sign up. First tweet 13 minutes later.

Nov 7, noon - Some more tweets...

Nov 7, 1:30pm - I petition the prime minister to lower Canada's voting age to 16. Several minutes later someone signs and retweets my petition.

Nov 7, >2pm - Decide to follow some people, including Rick Mercer and the Green Party. Get my first follower: Hooray.

Nov 7, 3:30pm - Find out that a cat has over 1.3 million followers on twitter, most of them are other cats. Rage ensues.

Nov 7, 12pm - Go to bed hating twitter whores: people who retweet themselves only to get on the "Trending Topics" list. Resolve not to become one.

Nov 8, 11:30am - Tweet about the Chelsea win over Manchester United. The ref sucked.

Nov 8, 12pm - Start a retweeting campaign to spread the word about lowering the voting age.

Nov 8, 12:30pm - No responses to the retweeting campaign, also one of my 2 followers stops following me because I didn't follow them. Another sign that they are a twitter whore.

Nov 8, 12:40pm - In an effort to jumpstart my campaign, I write this post.

MY VERDICT: Twitter is an easy and effective way to protest causes and spread messages. I fail to see any huge entertainment values in it though. I resolve to continue tweeting in an effort to build an effective propaganda base.

MY CAUSE: If you tweet already or are interested, be sure to check my page: @torwch, I'll follow you if you follow me... Just beware an onset of twitter whoredom. You join the movement by signing and retweeting my petitions below. Lets rouse our PM to action!

Any opinions (however inflammatory) can be written below:
-torwch

The Campaign Begins...

Hi there, for those who do not know me, I live in Canada and am currently under the voting age, which is 18 years. Remember that the movement does not need to effect you for you to be involved. Lets take this international.

The current voting age in Canada and around the world is 18. This age is used because we leave the free school system and start giving back to society through jobs or university course fees. Many people feel that anyone younger than that cannot appreciate the subtleties of politics and will be easily swayed by what their parents think.

Is this the subtleties of politics at work?

This opinion has fallen behind the times and like all other outdated junk, it should be replaced! Us young adults who are soon to enter university or the world should be given a say in what state we will find that world. Should we not have a choice as we build the foundations of our lives? With elections taking place every 5 to 4 years, 50% of today's youth will not vote before their 20th birthday. That is, if they even show up to vote:

Introduce politics sooner and interest will grow. Join the campaign; lower the voting age to 16.

The Morality of Immortality II

In the first few decades of "The Age of Immortality" we should be mindful that a plutocracy does not develop. In the beginning, not everyone would be immortal. Those who were would be smarter on account of there growing experience and depending on the form of immortality (Fanatic Avocados [1] [2]), they could be stronger; faster. If the proliferation of immortality is not fast enough or widespread, the governments of the world could dissolve into the 'elite' ruling the 'normal' kinda thing. If you have mastered mortality, you would have some pretty "sick" (pun) bio warfare equipment. In other words, resistance would be futile.
This flaw is one of the main reasons immortality research is so slow. Like any other form of medicine, it could no be distributed to everyone. As well, its price would only be affordable to a select few, further widening the gap between "us" and "them".

Box Cutters

What is Al Qaeda? A dangerous cult, well financed by oil and the spoils of war? Packing serious firepower in the form of ICBM's, nuclear warheads, and chemical bioterror agents? Does their inspired leader recruit new members everyday to add to the growing throng?

NO!

NO!

NO!!!

Please do not credit them with anything NEAR that. They are nothing more than a ragtag "group." They have few secret meetings, fewer new recruits, and a ZERO PERCENT chance of ever striking the US again in the likes of 9/11.

Always remember that their overall goal is to spread FEAR. Don't make it easy for them. Don't speculate their powers because they are few. Don't listen to the media hyped "terror alerts." Don't make the mistake of thinking that 9/11 was anything BUT a fluke. DON'T FEAR THEM.

Lets go over 9/11. 19 HIJACKERS, most of them younger than 30, entered several different planes armed with BOX CUTTERS. They then threatened the crew and passengers with said BOX CUTTERS and took control. The crew acted as they would to regular hijackers, not as they would act to SUICIDAL ONES. They went like sheep. Norad - Yes the thing that tracks santa on the internets - was occupied in a complex training exercise on Sept. 11th. As such, NO planes were SCRAMBLED to stop the hijackers from fulfilling their jihad-ish ends. The hijackers actually managed to HIT the TRADECENTERS, because I think the pilots would have no longer been flying the plane at that time. If you look closely to some of the video, you can see the plane swerving at the last second towards the building.

To sum it up:
19 HIJACKERS
BOX CUTTERS
SUICIDAL HIJACKERS
NO SCRAMBLED PLANES
HIT THE TARGET
They got darned lucky.
They were offered little-to-no resistance.
The only weapons they had were box cutters.
No one on the planes thought they were serious.
NORAD f***ed up.
And finally, some of them actually practiced long enough on Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Next thing you know the president blows his speechwriter's head off with THE WAR ON TERROR (deep voice) and goes on to invade several oily countries. More on that SMART MOVE later.

-torwch (blows a vein in his forehead)

Une Grande Quebec

For the last two weeks, me and my family have been driving through Quebec and the french-er parts of Ontario. For those who don't live in the best country in the world, Quebec and Ontario are the two largest provinces in Canada, the equivalent of the "states" in the US of A. Les francophones dans cet region represent the largest group of french speakers outside France. They even have their own version of the french language. The people I met told me it is very different from the original. These are some of the other things I learnt in and around les regions de français:

• In Quebec, it is legal to drive into an intersection and do a u-turn, going out in the opposite direction on the street you came in on.
• Close to 99% of those who spoke french as their first tongue could also speak english, even the kids... Not many of us could claim the reverse.
• Most of them can immediately tell if you are an anglophone (english as a 1st language). You walk up to a shopkeeper, greet them and tell them what you want to buy - all in perfectly pronounced french - and they will smile knowingly and say en anglais: "would you like a bag for that?" You CANNOT fool them, and goodness knows my mom tried.
• For some reason my french teacher thought it wise to teach us the type of french spoken in France, not the french spoken in our own damn country. Logic FAIL? This means a lot of my pronunciations and tenses are wrong. :/ ...
• When they celebrate Canada Day, they CELEBRATE it. I mean 2 hundred thousand people on the streets of Ottawa all dressed in red and white. That night, a concert that went to 11:00 pm and a fireworks show that lasted for what seemed like thirty minutes and had shells punching half-mile-wide light orbs in the air. That pretty much made my trip.
• Just like BC and Manitoba, Quebec is 100% hydroelectric.
• On les Îles de la Madeleine, a chain of beachy islands north of PEI that belong to Quebec, the sand is so fine, it SQUEAKS WHEN YOU WALK ON IT! It sorta sounds like air being let out of a balloon.
• Not all people who live in Quebec are raging separatists, the ones I talked to about it actually joked about DouCette never stepping down as leader of the Bloc de Quebecois. They are down-right friendlier that your average west-coaster.

This was your writer at large, torwch, about to dig into a delicious dinner of clams. Bon soir mes amis!

Staging a Coup

In many science fiction books you read, society has taken strange turns and strange ways of governance. very few of these books go into any detail as to HOW these changes came about. Revolution? Conquest? A politi.cal party?

What I am trying to ask is this: If and when we realize that our society's system is flawed, how can we change it?

An example would be prudent: A Brave New World - written in 1932 by Aldous Huxley, tells of a world were people are manufactured to fit certain niches in society. There are the lowly epsilons, who preform most of the manual labor and are half brain-dead. Then we have the Alpha's, or even the Alpha double-plus's. They oversee and "govern" the world while partying and, shall we say, making effective use of contraceptives... I put govern in "quotations" because there is really no Big-Brother like figure who starts the whole thing. The system has become self-sustaining, without the need for a dictator to run it.

Could a change in how our society is run like this ever happen? It would not take place overnight, but perhaps over a number of years could we bring about such a large change?

A problem with coups is that they don't last. As soon as the dictator dies, in an assassination or through old age, god forbid; the revolution is OVER! Even if they appoint their own son or daughter, their values are different and society's change is gone. Evidently, a leaderless revolution is needed...

But where can we find one? What world-wide organization continues to gain new converts everyday all the while having no visible or provable leader? Doh, religion of course. So I propose that the only way our society could drastically change is through a revolution PIGGYBACKING on religion...

Through a jihad it would spread through the world and BAM, a whole new planet, ready to serve. So to all the revolutionaries out there: if you want your thing to succeed, get God on your side. He's invincible.

Anarchy WIN- -torwch

...but only to a certain extent.

If one lets religion get too powerful, it will over through the government.
Religion is fundamentally a way of appealing to a higher authority.
If the people don't like you, they will pray to god and bring you DOWN.

A peaceful religion, like Buddhism, in which there are few priests and no supreme gods, are the best and the most beneficial to the people. These religions let people follow them casually, rather than enforcing a rigid "Do This Or Else" policy.
Plus they don't preach violence, so the government can ignore the needs religion and do the job it is supposed to: Govern.

Can a Country be Built on Religion?

I will start off with some questions: Can a country be run by a religion? Should the head of state and the head or the church hold the same power or position? What consequences does doing this impose?

Religion and Ruling seldom go hand in hand without intervention. During the Medieval age, kings were often seen as being "chosen by god," while this did increase their power to dietial (?) heights, it did limit them in some of the more *frivolous* activities. Some nobles got so pissed off that they formed their own religion solely to promote their aims. Henry the VIII of England (link) found it necessary, because of his 6?!?! wives to slaughter off most of the Protestant followers, preach the virtues of Catholicism to all who would listen, and declare himself the both the spiritual and political leader of England. He wasn't very committed though because on his deathbed, he converted back to being a Protestant.

Henry the VII, a fat vain king who never seemed to find the right lady.

Religion is usually seen as a form of rebellion. A sort of appeal to a higher authority. Here are some examples:

• Christ, in his day, was seen as many things. To his followers he was a martyr, to his family (yes he did have family) he was the miraculous child, and finally to the leaders of those days, he was a rebel. That is why they crucified him later.
• Muhammad, also a rebel, is said to have been met with criticism when he first began to preach. He, like Christ, was forced out of several cities because of his views.

For this reason, I believe that a stable country does not need to have a widely-practiced religion. A small order of monks that people may join by their own choice would be perfect. So, after that very long-winded post, I put forward the Dalai Lama and Buddaism as the best approach to religion.

That is how religion would look like in my ultimate country, only without the exile and occupation part...
torwch

Democracy is...

Democracy has two pillars on which it rests:

1. All citizens have equal access to power.
2. All citizens have and recognize universal rights and freedoms.

 Beyond that, the definition gets very shaky. Its name, derived from Greek, actually means society in which the majority of the citizens hold the power. That is considered to be unwieldy in our society, so we use a system of voting. This system gives us all a usually equal voice in how we are governed. However! Voting is not a fundamental pillar of democracy. The two are often said as one by politicians and reporters alike, but it is important to distinguish the difference between them.
 The governments that Canada, USA, much of Europe, and the other democratic states have are very good. They provide us all with infrastructure. They are responsible to the people. They recognize our rights and freedoms.  The problem with our society is in ourselves, and our fellow man.

 We have reached, after several painful dark ages of oppression, a system of equality; a state of equality.  However, we have reached this without knowing how to treat our fellow man as equals.  We cannot live at peace until we learn to combat our sense of inferiority and rise together (clique alert) as equals.

Mull that one over -torwch