"My one regret in life is that I am not someone else."

Who doesn’t love a funny Jewish comedian? The number of them is seemingly endless, from Jon Stewart and Jerry Seinfeld to Mel Brooks and Adam Sandler and many of them are considered the greatest comedians to ever live. I have personally looked up to many of them as my idols and have even attempted to be more like them. But there is one out of this group that really posses not only the amazing funny gene of all the others, but also an artistic talent and style that has never been rivalled. This man is the movie genius Woody Allen.

I was in some ways raised on Woody Allen as my mom sat me down as a young child to watch many of his movies. She lives by one of his jokes, that it is “illegal to buy retail,” and Annie Hall is her favourite movie. I went through a long Woody Allen hiatus, but recently I went on a whirlwind of movie watching and watched at least a dozen of his movies I had not seen. I was addicted to his wit and literary genius. I loved the all the beautiful New York apartments his characters live in. I loved the intellectual feel to the movies and his clear distaste of ignorance. Every actor you could imagine has been in his movies and Woody Allen is superb at casting and writing the perfect roles for them. As you watch the movies the common themes, mainly his clear distrust of the institution of marriage, become clear and get played out again and again but never stop being funny.

Not only is Woody Allen a master of satire and comedy, but also makes amazing dramas. A couple of his latest movies which were filmed in London, Match Point and Cassandra’s Dream, show just how great and exciting a story he can write. They are suspenseful and enlightening and Allen leaves you with a crystal clear message from the movies.

Whether it is a comedy or drama, a satire or a musical, one thing you can count on when you see that classic white lettering during the credits is that you’re in for a great movie. For those who want to watch some Woody Allen movies, here’s a list of my favourites.

Annie Hall, Crimes & Misdemeanors, Husbands & Wives, Manhattan Murder Mystery, Deconstructing Harry, Match Point, Scoop, Cassandra’s Dream

General Accepted Ambiguousness

I write this entry sitting in a classroom learning the various ins and outs of accounting. Perhaps I should be more closely paying attention, but I can assure you that I am a superb multitasker. I have not written a blog entry in months, but I felt that filling this time with writing would be more productive than endless trawling of news on the internet. The main reason I am writing this entry is because of what I have learned in accounting and the effect of this knowledge on my outlook of the business world; in short, learning how companies keep track of their finances has shown me just how contrived and open to dishonesty accounting practices really are.

Accounting practices do follow guidelines which are supposed to keep them honest. The guidelines are referred to as the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles or GAAP and companies in North America have to follow them by law. Unfortunately, due to a total lack of transparency, the accounting practices of a company are very difficult to uncover. Each company puts out various financial statements, but because they are able to control and shift their own revenues and costs around from year to year, they can easily present a much rosier or poorer picture of what is actually occurring at the firm. This leads outside accountants and analysts to perform forensic accounting in which they attempt to dissect the financial statement and more or less guess at what has been occurring at the company. This analysis is the public’s view of the company and what affects the company’s stock price. So, in the end, a company’s stock price is more or less dependent on statements which may or may not tell the whole truth about a company and this lack of transparency can have a huge effect on the stock market overall. This system has been improved over the years after such several companies twisted and contorted these rules to publish completely misleading financial statements. The most notorious of these companies was Enron, who literally made their crumbling shell of a company look like solid gold.

Luckily history tells us that dishonest accounting practices eventually catch up with you, but only after hurting lots and lots of people in your downfall. Full transparency of accounting, perhaps disclosed to a government run auditor, could help keep companies truly honest while maintaining some degree of discretion. Either way, the rules are set up to cover manager’s interest rather than all the other stakeholders in the company, from the private investors to the receptionists. Governments of advanced economies need to establish strong transparency guidelines to avoid crippling crisis in the financial system due to gross misinformation.

-DG

Pseudo-intelligence

I realize everyone’s not a scientist. Math is difficult to some people, as is logic. Some people are more intuitive, others just not smart enough; but fortunately our world is blessed with people who fully understand science and all its amazing benefits. These people are our doctors, engineers and researchers and have brought to us all the modern benefits of our exceedingly technical world. I myself am trained as an engineer, and the responsibility upon me to improve life around me using my technical expertise is not one I take lightly. I think it is fine for people to possess different skills and knowledge in our society, as this specialization is in fact the foundation of all economies. What bothers me is deep seeded paranoia of science and scientists that seems to persist throughout much of the community which itself is ignorant of science.

It would be logical for those who do not understand to trust those that do, but rather they become paranoid and fearful of what they do not understand. This paranoia and fear then extends to those scientists, perhaps because they have difficulty comprehending their knowledge, in the same way I have difficulty understanding such ignorance. This is likely born out of human fear of the unknown and is an unfortunate problem in our world, but this is not the issue which drove me to write this blog. What bothers me so much are those who prey on the fears of those ignorant people and purposely mislead them in order to make money. Not only are they deceiving people out of their money, but they are also propagating their ignorance and even promoting their fear and paranoia of the unknown. This slows progress and causes social policy to be dominated by fear rather than reason.

There are countless examples of this sort of preying on ignorance, but perhaps one of the most poignant examples of this are the many Q-Ray products. I’m sure you’ve seen their infomercials advertising their bracelets which promote wellness, optimize your own bio-energy and of course do not provide any explanation of how they work. The most confusing product I found on their website is the EMF Protection Chip (http://www.qray.ca/QRayCart/Product.aspx?sku=1201). These clips claim to protect your body from harmful EMF waves using bio-metals and PiRay Technology. Of course there are no such things as bio-metals, and Pi, the ratio of circumference to diameter of a circle, has nothing to do EMF waves. The EMF waves they speak of are the electromagnetic field waves which propagate from anything with electric current or magnetism. You are constantly bombarded by them, not only from electronic devices, but from the many radio waves travelling through the air, microwaves coming from space, the Earth’s own magnetic field and even light. There has been no documented harm caused by these waves which we are normally exposed too (with the exception of putting your head in a microwave oven) nor could a $12.95 (plus S&H) chip prevent their propagation through your body.

People can believe whatever they want, and I feel much more sympathy than disdain for their ignorance, but it appals me to see people preying on them and promoting their paranoia and ignorance of our modern world. It’s the 21^st century.

From Blogger Pictures

Worth Keeping

There is something about nature. By something I mean the power it possesses to affect me when I am immersed in it. Recently I had the pleasure of visiting the Pacific Northwest and was blown away by the mountains and incredibly tall red-wood trees. Beyond viewing the beauty there I also toured several Native American historical sites there and observed their lost way of life. Upon learning how they lived I felt a deep jealousy of the simplicity and beauty of their life. Living off immense wilderness, plentiful with food and a perfect climate seemed to me to be the ideal life. The ease of life they enjoyed can be seen in the amazing art they had time to develop, not having to spend most of their days just surviving. The totem poles which they built out of stone tools are an amazing accomplishment. Living off a healthy diet of fish and immersed in incredible natural beauty they were able to design a beautiful and unique artistic style which is one of my personal favourites in the history of the world. I personally like to think that the reason those Natives never progressed technologically is because they already had the perfect life.

Of course nature’s beauty is all around us and is as diverse as the Earth is large. After my trip I returned home to the Atlantic Northeast. Although nature’s physical features are not as immense or powerful here as on the Pacific, it is beautiful all the same. Inspired by the wilderness on the Pacific I went hiking in Blomidon Provincial Park in Nova Scotia and all but forgot the Pacific, coming face to face with Nova Scotia’s own unique wilderness.  I feel so lucky to live in a nation with so much untouched wilderness, but at the same time I am afraid that our nation could end up like those in Europe where their forests and wilderness have been all but obliterated. Much of Canada’s wilderness is so because no one has developed it yet, but little of it is actually protected. Logging, mining and the tar sands are constantly destroying our wild (and it is ours) with little stopping them, all in the name of economic progress. Surely in a nation as large as Canada we can have both: large comfortable cities with plentiful energy and natural resources while maintaining large swaths of wilderness and expansive national parks. The government simply needs to commit to protecting large areas of wilderness from private interests and surely this will benefit the greater good. In our times of in-activity and stressful, stimulated lives, getting back in touch with old home in the wild can be the best therapy.

-DG

P.S. I have included several photos of my recent trips.

Nature Blog

A Dangerous Mix

Human beings have a strong affinity to fit in, to be part of a group larger than themselves of those who feel the same as they do. Any observer of human nature or of history can recognize this as a trait which we all are susceptible to. In general this is beneficial as it leads to organization and cooperation of people, which was necessary to accomplish the many great achievements in our society. But this same drive, when applied to idealism and beliefs, can lead to a divisiveness and irrationality that can undermine a modern society's operation.

 Today it takes the form of two major aspects of people’s lives: politics and religion. Unfortunately in society today these two things are combined into a single ideal. Where politics should be the discussion of the operation of a nation, based on bettering your life and the lives of those in your society, it has been more and more infected by the belief that politics should be an extension of a person’s moral beliefs. Often such strong moral beliefs are inevitably based in religion or spirituality.  The idea that any human being on this Earth knows the true way a society should be run seems absurd. Many, many leaders in history have told their public that they know this supposed truth and then tricked them into given them wide ranging powers over the free lives of individuals. The most common source of this truth is a higher power, the idea that God decided to tell a select few people how to run society. The other source is a perversion of science, when someone dictates that their select pseudoscience can save a nation and lead it to glory (the obvious case of this would be the Nazis). It does not make sense to assume that anyone does know the exact way a society should be run for it is much too complicated. A good example of this is the current total confusion over the economy, the main reason for this being no one completely understands how it works. Perhaps one day when we possess the computing power to completely simulate (and get a simulation that is exact) we will be able to say we know how to run it better, but until that day we must rely on what scientists, engineers and businessmen rely on day in and day out: rationality and pragmatism.

 Yes we have basic human rights which must be upheld, and although this can be thought as a type or moralism, most people on Earth can agree on the basic fundamental human rights. We do not need to come up with them, as the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights already has. Beyond those tenants we must rely on observation of society, and a pragmatic approach of applying those policies which improve human life for all of those in a society and ignoring those which do not. This means leaving behind beliefs which may be a luxury for those living in a perfect society and perhaps even allowing some human vices legality, but always applying policies which cause the least harm. This idea of lesser evils and least bad options differs from the ideas which have preceded it, in that it is based rationality and disbanding personal beliefs for the greater good. Perhaps once we’ve abandoned our partisan beliefs and stop fighting with each other over the ideal way to run society and just compromise and agree to run society as best we can, we’ll all be a little better off.

 -DG

Constitutional Violence

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed"

Unfortunately most people, if asked where the above statement is from, what it means and what impact it has on them, would not be able to answer correctly. Most would likely say it sounds old, maybe even outdated. What exactly is a "well regulated militia" and in what way is it necessary to the security of a modern free State, such as the United States? Of course this statement is in fact very old and certainly outdated. States now attempt to possess a monopoly on violence in the military and para-military (police) and any militia would likely be violently suppressed. Yet this statement still has a huge impact on life in America and is fanatically supported. This statement of course is the Second Amendment to the United States Bill of Rights, an article of the US Constitution, and the reason for the current proliferation of guns and their lack of government control.

Today I read about not one, but two terrible attacks on innocents using firearms, resulting in a total of almost 30 people being shot and killed. As a human being I’m appalled at the level of violence. Of course this is not the first, nor the last case of individual psychopaths attacking the innocent population, and I am not proposing anyway to control such psychopaths as it is probably not possible in a free society. What I am rejecting is the defence of the current amount of gun control in America today. The man who went on a shooting spree in Alabama recently had 5 different firearms including 2 assault rifles. Just the fact that a citizen could possess even one assault rifle seems so absurd that I have a difficult time believing it; until of course I read about a man shooting up a neighbourhood with one. Weapons like assault rifles and handguns were designed for the sole purpose of KILLING HUMAN BEINGS. These are not guns used to kill animals - in fact it is illegal in some areas to hunt with assault rifles because it is seen as inhumane. Thank God the deer are protected.

 Guns have no place in modern society. States that work best possess a monopoly on violence and do not allow civilians to police themselves in "self defence." Weapons specifically designed to kill human beings should be outlawed and under no circumstances should they be allowed in public. They serve no desirable purpose and only pose a danger to the many good natured citizens who just want to live in peace. The Second Amendment is a 250 year old relict of time when America was a wild frontier, when the founding fathers saw an idea of a free state with little to no government. This was a time before police. Before professional armies. Before high-tech handguns and rifles and a time when you may even have to hunt dinner on a regular basis. Anyone who reads the amendment sees how completely irrelevant it is today. How much more violence can be allowed in sake of tradition, self defence and the general paranoia and culture of violence that unfortunately exists in much the neglected United States?

 

-DG

 

First Twitter, Now Blogger

As my title indicates I first established myself in the world of Twitter recently. I am now the lucky recipient of a half dozen email-updates to my mail box on the lives of 2 friends who I have not spoken too in months. As you may guessed I have not been "blown away" by Twitter and its updates, but luckily I had low expectations.  I am a person who believes Facebook is a benefit to my life and has allowed me to stay in touch with old friends, find the addresses and dates of parties and of course found out which of the people I went to highschool with are married and/or pregnant. Twitter however does not seem to provide much benefit. Twitter rather just supplies me with only the inane and compulsive aspects of Facebook (and MSN Messenger) such as status updates. No doubt this does fill a compulsive need of many addicted to "crackbook," one of which I, and everyone else who uses it (whether admittedly or not) have succumb to every now and then. I'd rather not see proliferation of this one aspect of internet social networks, as it is basically a vice, not dissimilar from gambling. Of course all I can do is just not participate and hope to dissuade other people from trying it out, especially those who I know are prone to this sort of vice.

As you may also guess from my blog title this is also my first blog -- ever. I see blogging as a great thing to anyone who does it on a regular basis as writing is something that most people should do more. I started blogging to practice my writing skills and to keep them sharp during my temporary hiatus from school, and I hope someone will read them too (more than just Katie?).

I'll stop now to make sure to leave some for my next entry, likely very soon. Stay tuned for my next rant on...

 

-DG