Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17

What a tragedy. And you know what's sad? You may never know the truth. You will forget it, before you know it.

Remember TWA Flight 800? Talk about coincidence. July 17th, 1996.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Flight_800

The most probable cause:
It doesn't matter what the exact cause is. Someone could have been too trigger-happy, or someone deliberately shot it down, or it was misidentified - it doesn't matter.

What's a crazy theory?
That MH17 is MH370, complete with all its passengers. Right, then how about all the crying relatives? Or the airport people who saw them board?

What we know:
Think about it. Do you really know anything about it?

Everything we're getting is secondary information. Anything goes. Even mutual accusations. A rational human would realize this and believe nothing.

Optimum move:
Let the public awareness die down naturally. Expect people not to see why it happens. It took just a few months for MH370 to be forgotten. Exploit for propaganda purposes to fullest extent possible. People will believe what they wish to believe, or what they fear is true.

What we can expect:
Nobody admit or deny it. Neither is not politically advantageous.
Every side will use the incident to support their position.
At least a side will try to make evidence impossible to use.

What to learn:
The art and science of killing people has been perfected to an extreme degree. Combine that with government monopoly on Initiation of Force and this is how it will go wrong. Allow a government to support a related organization with weapons and you have many landmines waiting to go off.

We should all assume we are being manipulated.

Once you realize this, you realize there is no immediate solution to ending wars, conflicts, dirty politics, etc.

What you can do:

Don't be a victim. It sucks to be a victim. People will write RIP FB posts and then forget about you in a week. It will be as if you have never lived.

Stay far, far away from conflict zones. There will always be victims, but it doesn't have to be you. I thought about vacationing to Iran, but decided against it for cost and security issues. There are other interesting places to go.

Be prepared. Most disasters are actually very survivable.

Stay informed. See something, say something. There is a dimension to this mess that we do have control, and that's information.

Impressive AR Climbing Wall

http://gizmodo.com/augmented-reality-climbing-walls-turn-mountaineering-in-1609640162

Future climbers will be so much better. It is now far easier to visualize the climbing routes. Building route planning skills is now so much easier. Gamification allows climbers to repeat difficult moves until perfection.

It's clearer than ever, that with adequate time commitment, anyone can become a master climber.

Transformers 4: Not what it seems to be

After enjoying the movie with friends, my brain began to spin up.

1. What are the morals of the story?
2. Are there any hidden subplots? If so, what are they?
3. Are there any agendas?

2 & 3 are pretty much related.

Family

I believe that at its heart, Transformers is about dysfunctional families, coming together and experiencing what "family" is like. "Family", as in a military sense, like a "Band of Brothers", with all the emotional bonds.

Family is the elephant in the room.
Family...
is what almost all the characters do not have. Both the girlfriend and boyfriend don't have complete families, or good parents.
is what the AutoBots provide (however, comedic they seem.)
is what makes people strong.

The movie is not directly advocating for whole families. Instead, it's more about the connection. When people are connected, they can do anything.

Men

Basically, Men drive the show. Women help out, but it's really about the men. The tech entrepreneur, the male-sounding robots, the male villains, the agents, the soldiers, the police. And it's not even sexist.

When you put it together, I think it's about the impact the choices men make have on the world. When they choose to be evil, they are really committing IoFs against other males first. They'll be IoFs against females as blackmail, or if they get in the way. There is a kind of biological instinct to eliminate male competition first, and to get the females on your side..

There's a lot of truth to this.

Government

Governments are so inept in the world of Transformers it's hilarious. Whether it's Chicago, somewhere in Texas or in Quarry Bay, government agencies are always one step behind...except when they are committing an IoF or doing something illegal. And when US agents try operating in HK, they get their a** kicked by a random Chinese guy in the lift!

Or what about the dealings with space aliens. The US try to play them off against each other, but suffer blowback when the "allies" have had it with government inefficiencies. At the cosmic scale, government is like a helpless playground bully flailing, trying to get a grip on its people.

Of course, it's still a very dangerous game. The main characters spend most of their time and energy running away from the state and hoping to prove their innocence, besides simultaneously trying to save the world.

Heroes

How many anime/comics enthusiasts wouldn't want a real life action hero to fly out of the blue and rescue them? It's like the best fantasy ever!

Movies like TF4 feed on this. That's partly why people watch them.

Out of suspended disbelief, we know there are no such superheroes in reality. Indulging in fantasies and worshiping non-existent beings makes one weak and oblivious to what it really takes to win.

Transformium

At first, I thought transformium was one way to show off the SFX. Which it does brilliantly.
But deeper, it seems to be about how information rules the physical world.

When you take away the AutoBot heroes, you realize how helpless the little man is, in a world where technology and information supersedes the biological beings, even the creators. An obvious example of this is the quirky entrepreneur is really being controlled by Galvetron.

Robots

In the movie, robots are insanely powerful. Amazingly, the most destructive militaries on the planet cannot deal with them. Now, movies are about suspended disbelief, but this is just downright ridiculous.

Why this? Whether it's true or not, Hollywood believes that technology works for those who are most innovative AND resourceful. Technology can be used as a weapon, passively and actively.

Combine it with...

Might makes Right

The most common of Hollywood themes. The good guys somehow overcome overwhelming odds and save the day, sometimes with tech, sometimes without tech. When it's without tech, more disbelief needs to be suspended and people are supposed to go "That's so cool, as in military cool, like how blowing stuff up is cool". When it's with tech, people are supposed to go WOW at the gadgets and become inspired by it. Either way, the movies are trying to sell stuff. And the idea that might makes right. How animalistic, for a movie selling high-tech consumer products/military hardware.

You know the good guys are always going to win

You knew that, didn't you?

Yeah, what's the deal here?

Trivia

Did you know one of the AutoBots is voiced by John DiMaggio, the Voice of Bender (Futurama)?

Conclusion

Transformers is a lie!

I'm not sure if you picked up on these consciously. If you did, good for you. Now you can go deprogram yourself. If not, you can always choose to ignore everything you read here.

To be continued...

Re:Re:Re:On Violence

"... ... My reservation for your Initiation of Force (IoF) concept is that it is widespread in nature. There are food chains and animals hunting other animals, and this process is inherently violent. Given this occurs all the time, I would hesitate to consider all of these IoF to all be immoral."

Yay! Great argument!

I should change it to "IoF by a human against other humans is immoral." We are, after all, talking about human morality.

Thanks for the bug report!

Below are some other approaches to the problem.

---

So the problems are "Are all IoFs immoral? What about animals hunting OTHER animals? Why are humans different from other animals?"

Questioning 

Is it reasonable to apply human morality to non-humans? From bacteria to the whole universe we call "nature"?

You can't communicate with them, so what's the point? For the civil engineer in you, have you tried to talk a hill out of making landslides onto the road? Lecture it about human morality? No, you reinforce the slope and prevent it - self-defense against slopes.

So yes, it's immoral. And there's no choice but self-defense.

Naive

Do prey animals prefer to live or be eaten? No. Do I prefer harmful bacteria giving me a cold? Not particularly.

So is it immoral? Yes. It's no different from human murder, assault, robbery.

Should we stop it? Can you? No. What would you do...imprison all the tigers? :) It does feel good for everyone involved to save creatures from the slaughter though.

What about humans killing other animals?
This is the most telling of all the cases. Why do we kill other animals? For food, for hunting,... We haven't been able to make more humane versions, so if we want meat, it's 'slaughter the cows' or don't eat beef. So in the strictest sense, it's immoral too. And as for hunting, that's still violence, just violence with far less consequences than hunting other humans.

Short

That's why we have morality to guide us and animals don't. Humans have far more choices and no biological guide about what to do with our lives. Some sense of morality also helps some organizations refrain from wiping the species out. Animals? Morality is inconsequential and pointless for them, as nature selection is their priority.

Cynical

Sure, if we want to end civilization as we know it and start hunting the weaker humans (Hunger Games!!!), why not? It would just be turning back thousands of years of human progress :)

Long

As Short Me said, that's why we NEED morality to LIVE, as a human society. Animals know what they have to do, since birth. Humans need love, care, parenting, education, skills, direction, a will to live. Babies fresh out of the womb have none of these things but need all of them to become fully functioning humans.

And to live together, we need morality. Actually, that's half-true, because the moment any group of humans come together, morality will arise naturally. Because we have choices. Should we shoot each other on sight, or trade, or work together? If we trade, how do we trade so that everyone gets what they want? Before you know it, you have to make decisions on what's moral.

Some moral codes allow some civilizations to do better than others overall. A city considers armed robbery illegal and tries the suspects will generally do better than another that considers armed robbery a nuisance, but does nothing about them. Why? Economics. The robbers would rush to rob the latter because it's more profitable!

That's an extreme case but I think you'll find examples everywhere, for all sorts of IoF. It's not even that IoFs are immoral, it's just not economical or people don't like it.

So let's say humans do become animals. Great. But even in survival situations where sadists or "mother nature" forces humans become animals, people WILL work together or against each other. Morality arises again.

Animal Me

Even animals have morality among themselves. It's good for passing down the genes. I wonder where it came from, but they would just not do very well without something like this.

- Don't eat all the offspring and family! (obvious)
- Kill the prey! Don't cannibalize (unless you have to)!
- Breed as much as possible!
- Take care of offspring. (Parenting species)

Humans on the other hand, generally don't just want to pass down the genes. We have way more choices than that. So we have different rules.

Conclusion

All IoF is immoral and the victims don't like it(By definition), but morality is important to the degree in which the agent have choices and consequences. Telling the cat to stop eating mice is pointless. But telling a kid to not eat other kids may help - he has the capacity to understand that nobody would play with a kid-eater, and the ability to override feral instincts and eat something else. Without choice, human morality doesn't simply become useless or inapplicable, the whole phenomenon just doesn't occur.

"Widespread in nature"... doesn't make it moral by human morality. Rather, it just means that animal nature doesn't care about human morality. No, animals aren't even an active part of humanity that the phenomenon of morality arose from. Well, except as resources. It also precedes any humans or morality by millions of years.

Morality as described here arises naturally, then people try to write it down as best they can. But actions, moral/immoral/inconsequential-morally, have consequences for us. That's why it's worth studying.