Thursday 31 March 2011

Chaos separates twins


Contradictions are nothing to Discordians. – Mad Malik of the Norton Cabal

An entertaining finding has come out of Canadian bioscience. Apparently, Canadian identical twins are not really identical. Presumably, we are expected to extrapolate that ALL identical twins are not truly identical, but that’s just not good science.

The findings of the Canadian researchers are basically that genes are dynamic and that small changes take place across the lifespan that occur independent of someone else having shared the same womb and genetic material.
Since most cultures in the world have long since gotten of the disturbing romanticization that identical twins are the same person, the societal implications of these findings are minimal. In fact, to most people, this neatly explains why Mary-Kate Olsen is disturbingly thin and addicted to cocaine, and Ashley Olsen somehow manages to mostly stay out of the tabloids. 

The researchers want to point to the consequences on centuries or research, lamenting that they could never have the perfect control group after all. Unfortunately there is, and always has been, chaos in everything. In this case, the chaos in question is what the researchers know as confounds. They are always there, potentially messing with every attempt to determine a cause and effect relationship. The real lesson here is that there is no such thing as a perfect experiment. Chaos is everywhere. The only difference in a laboratory is that, if you’re very lucky, you’ll get to see exactly how it shatters everything you thought you knew, in real time.
 

Wednesday 30 March 2011

Baby causes chaos for public transport

Suffice to say that Eris is not hateful of malicious. – Principia Discordia

A bizarre bit of news caught my attention today. Apparently a woman and her child in Australia were kicked off of a bus because the baby was laughing too loudly. The situation is pretty fascinating to anyone who has ever ridden public transit: of all the things that have ever happened to justify kicking someone off a bus, this driver had to pick on a happy baby.

Sometimes, I guess people just have to find some way to impose order and this baby was an easy target. It is, after all, difficult to find more evidence that people are predisposed towards chaos than by observing small children and babies.  They will laugh, cry, wet themselves, and demand to be fed, without regard for cultural standards, where they happen to be, or what anyone will think of them. For someone who has dedicated themselves to order, a baby is an easy target. 

The driver didn’t even target a crying baby, which everyone knows is beyond anyone’s power to quiet reliably without causing serious injury. Instead, the target was a happy baby, and it is easy to make a baby unhappy, so this mother was targeted for not using her power to make her child unhappy. It certainly makes me wonder what kind or narcissist this bus driver must be to think that her whim should be enough for a mother to interfere with a child’s happiness. 

By trying to keep some extreme version of order on her bus, the driver has probably thrown her own life into chaos: the kind of uproar that has resulted after this incident usually sees results. The predictable result will be that the driver will lose her job. This is usually the easiest way for an organization to deal with high-profile complaints.

Changing tone for a moment, I would like to explore some scenarios in which the bus driver may have been in the right:

  1. The bus was being high-jacked and the driver wanted to protect the child without drawing dangerous attention to the high-jacking.
  2. The bus had failed to pass an emissions check and the passenger’s area of the bus was found to be filled with a level of toxic fumes dangerous to children.
  3. It was not a baby at all, but a bomb concealed in baby clothes.
  4. The baby had a sonic-based super power, and the laughing was causing glass to break and ears to bleed.

Tuesday 29 March 2011

Chaos in Libya

There is serenity in Chaos. Seek ye the Eye of the Hurricane - Principia Discordia


As a Discordian, I see a lot of my beliefs being manifested in world events today. Not just simply because there is so much Chaos, but in the way people are responding to it. I'm seeing the inner Discordians of people from all walks of life manifest.

If you are a fellow Discordian, then you probably see it already. If you are not a Discordian, you may be curious about what I am referring to. 

Today I want to discuss what's going on in Libya. The people of Libya are rising up to depose Muammar Gaddafi, who has been in charge for 42 years. On its surface, there's nothing more Discordian than wanting to shake things up, particularly if they have been stagnant for 42 years. What I find particularly interesting about this is the international reaction: People are largely supportive of the protests, as well as concerned that a new government will just be more of the same. 

The concerns that the typical Discordian would have about this type of uprising is in regards to the ideology that will take over. In the cycle of Chaos and Order, after a series of protests now verging on all-out war, there will likely be a strong desire for stability in the region, and that's where the inner Discordians should be very concerned: Instead of putting someone in power who wants all the things they were protesting for, they could easily pick someone simply to put things back to normal. That could easily mean they would forget the freedom they were fighting for and choose someone based on their ability to establish the status quo, likely through wealth or international contacts. It seems unlikely that the Libyan people took to the streets to get themselves a self-serving puppet dictator, so hopefully they can keep their eyes on the prize when the dust starts to settle.