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Actually, if someone were to make a movie about my life, he could get the bulk of it in the can simply by having Nicolas Cage bellow the alphabet to a bemused-looking secretary then scream incoherently about bees before weeping, mustache-down, into a sequined duvet. It'd require few additional elements. Anything beyond the inclusion of a short scene in which he snags his sleeve on a doorhandle would just be padding...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEE-q_2Kxso     

I think both can be true, in some measure - these impulses seem to work, at least on me, as an opposing pair: comfortable routine pulls from below, whilst indecision or even worry about change pushes down from above.

Interestingly, there was an article published today on the odd paralysis that accompanies an excess of choice:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/05/charlie-brooker-cultural-diet

I wonder if it was ever thus - although the internet provides a massive number of distractions, it also vastly increases the number of ways in which a person can inform himself, and I doubt that the number of people born with natural gifts which include an insatiable curiosity about the universe has dropped since, for example, the Renaissance.

Perhaps the difference lies in the attributes of this age, which is one of flux. The human mind, which was a perfectly good survival tool for the several hundred thousand years in which the only major leaps forward were the leisurely transitions from stone to bronze and from bronze to iron, finds itself adrift, baffled by the fantastic rate of change, driven into retreat and insularity. We're not sure what to do, or who to be - unable to deal with the fundamental problems, we fixate upon small things - what shoes define me as a person? In the absence of certainty of purpose, will a Trilby do instead?

I mean, I paint. Or at least, I try to. I go to my studio, and stand there in front of my easel, horror-struck by the enormity of everything that's gone before - several decades since a factory-produced urinal became High Art, how can I choose a way to go when anything and everything, all of possibility, lies open? Sometimes I start something, and find I have used Gauguin's colours, and then I remember Freud's and think that no, that isn't it. That isn't it at all.

It was easier to paint, I imagine, when painting was mostly empty, saccharine reflections on Classical myth designed to titillate the rich, even if only because there was something to reject. So it is with living.

We're like those Russian women who, after the Berlin Wall came down and the West flooded in, would go to the new supermarket to buy washing powder and find themselves paralysed by choice, weeping in the detergents aisle, baffled by innumerable brightly-coloured boxes. Before, there had only been a handful, and they did not know what to do.

"The creators of an Aids awareness advertisement that shows a woman having sex with a series of dictators [there's a link to movie on the page], including Hitler and Stalin, defended it today, amid growing criticism."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/07/germany-aids-advertisement-hitler-stalin


or


Both necessary reactions.

If there's such a thing as an Accidental Discordian, Icke would seem to fit...

Also, I have seen the Lizards.

They're hawt. All Illuminati robes and no knickers.

The sacred usually lies just round the corner from the profane...
There are solitary, hidden places in public places - train stations, hospitals and libraries - where no-one goes; not because they're behind locked doors, but because there seems to be an unwritten rule that you just "don't." Sometimes I like to stand there, to see what it's like amongst the purposeless signs and the drifts of receipts, all the little, unwanted secrets.

In the not-too-distant future, the decision is made to link parliamentary candidates to tabloid celebrities in an attempt to improve voter turnout. The corpses of Jade Goody and Princess Diana are exhumed and combined into a decaying grotesque by the Daily Mail's genetic research labs, and the resulting abomination seizes power with its horrible tentacles...

Respond "vigorously?" By doing what - fifty pushups, a bout of frenzied masturbation, an assertive yet meticulous cover-up? Or will they merely ignore the accusatons with great vigour?

Not many outsiders know this, but when Brits turn eighteen, we make a journey into the deep, secret chasms below Stonehenge, where they live, and make a vow to sow ruin wherever the opportunity presents itself, in a vile ritual predating spoken language. It's totally true.

When I read this, I was suddenly compelled to drive to the woods and live amongst the squirrels, learn their ways, and take a bride amongst them, so that I don't have to talk to anyone any more.

Also, because squirrels are hawt.

I sometimes wish I could explode peoples' heads from a distance. I'd just sit down in a comfertabuhl chair, and let my mind wander up into the ether making contact with other minds, sifting through other people's memories, until it contacted the mind of a complete bastard, maybe, you know, ONE OF THOSE CUNTS WHO STONED A 13 YEAR OLD RAPE VICTIM TO DEATH. 

And I'd just squeeze. And somewhere in the world, some gun-toting, bearded Sharia-ponce would collapse, stricken, in a ruined, bloodied heap. I'd get 'em all, eventually.

But it's not good to think about that kinda stuff for too long. Ties my insides in knots...

"[..]and the clue is that with these moral behavioral patterns, over an impressive test period of at least 2 million years (though likely much more), our species has managed to become by far the most successful on the planet."

Apart from bacteria, which are by most practical standards immeasureably more successful and are by human standards entirely amoral.

Most human morality can be distilled into those impulses which benefit the tribe to which one belongs. Within that framework, even genocide is a moral act - the intended result is usually more resources for your tribe, that its numbers might increase, and fewer or none for the poor buggers on the receiving end, who can no longer consume resources that might otherwise go to you and yours. This, and protecting your children from a hungry lioness are two halves of the same red and terrible coin, in my opinion, for the lioness also has cubs to feed, and without their mother they'll starve - are their lives less valid than ours? Has shooting the lioness changed the Sum of things?

I reckon the only difference between a "good" action and a "bad" lies is the condition of human empathy, which doesn't actually seem to matter very much in the application, the infliction of morality on human beings - on the whole, we behave like assholes despite our capacity for empathy. We just feel bad about it afterwarrds.

"Trouble started when the children's entertainer brought up Genesis 1:16, which reads: "God made two great lights -- the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars," and pointed out that the lesser light was actually a reflector.

"At this point, several people in the audience stormed out, including woman with three small children who shouted, "We believe in God!" and left."

1) The moon gives off its own light.
2) Therefore, God exists.
3) Profit.

And "High School Musical."