Cicero once commented that it was impossible for any two members of the College of Augurs to pass one another in the street without bursting into laughter. Any well educated member of the academic elite - so long as their self-aggrandising megalomania is kept in check - realizes that the same can be said of ’scientists’. In many ways scientists are becoming the priestly class in our society supported by a complicated scaffolding of esoteric knowledge. The primary function of the scientific cultural institutions we are taught to revere is not to disseminate reality to the masses, but rather to comfort the uneducated. Upon joining the academic world as a researcher one of the first things learned is that the intellectual giants are just people who haven’t a got a clue about anything even in their own field. The difficulty becomes admitting that because we are enculturated in such a way that we rely on the institutions we create in order to make sense of our world. Here I’m referring to my own culture because trying to assign that same ‘need to know’ about the world to other groups opens a whole other can of theoretical worms. In many ways the institutions of science have replaced the ‘churches’ and organized religions although many would be infuriated by the idea. It is plain to see if you take a look at even the last five years of publication in any academic journal. Ideas that were seen as foundational and well constructed have been assaulted and turned over. Apparently, depending on who you ask, the human genome consists of only 1/3 of the number of genes originally predicted before the mapping began over a decade ago. One of the results is that the function and operation of ‘genes’ has become increasingly difficult to pinpoint. Even an agreed upon definition of the term is impossible to find and it has only become a way of speaking to the public (the uneducated masses seeking comfort) about ’scientific’ discoveries. Only a few months ago the BBC ran a segment on obesity and a ‘fat gene’ was referred to. It takes no fewer than 3 or 4 alleles to make up your eye-colour. How many do you suppose it takes to affect your body weight? Even the once deterministic view of genetics made popular in the 80s has been abandoned by prominent science, but the wholly incorrect view of genes being ‘responsible’ for anything is held onto like a safety blanket by the public. If the venerable ’scientists’ can’t define it, what intellectual right do laypeople have to use it in common discussion? As was mentioned previously, chemotherapy is used as a treatment for something thought of as a flaw in a cell’s genetic sequence that tells it to stop dividing. There is no guarantee whatsoever that this is the only or even the primary cause for cancer. The line between genetic and environmental influence is continuing to blur as genetic research carries on. So, if we can’t define gene and we don’t really know what cancer is - why it starts, exactly how to stop it, etc. - and the treatments we use are only effective a % of the time (another easy to understand example of the intellectual fallacy - if we actually understood it, we should be able stop it 100% of the time) then what does that say about the ‘ivory tower’. Once you’re there you realize that the people in it - the ’scientists’ - really are like Cicero’s members of the College of Augers. The majority of the population is akin to children asking what the stars are made of. The child doesn’t care what the answer is so long as it is delivered with authority and provides some comfort that their world is understood. If we can understand it, we can control it. Therefore, in many ways science has become the place to turn for those who refuse to believe in the divine or don’t want to participate in organized religions, but still desperately want to sleep at night believing in something. The word ‘belief’ is, itself, a historically specific Christian development suitable for another discussion. So, ’scientists’ throw on the white lab coat, speak with an authoritative voice, and whisper into the ears of the populace that they are safe and ‘mommy and daddy love them’.

Wow, a sudden drop in posting, amazing what the release of a certain video game I can’t stop playing can do to content flow.

Regular programming set to resume shortly.

In the meantime, check out this comic strip from VGcats. It really captures what it’s like to be in the fray of TeamFortress 2. Also this one from Penny Arcade parodying echochrome. heh.

Well, back to Smash Brothers for me.

ps - zOMG Star WOlf! sauce sauce

Every time I start to write this rant, I delete it because I think I fall short. The other posts on mental-enema are amazingly good and I never think my writing can even come close in comparison. I feel like there is a standard that I have to achieve before I post my work.This got me thinking about my rant, on reality television and the melo-dramatic bullshit that everyone seems to love. There is so obviously not a standard when it comes to what we watch. This is evident when we look at television shows like Big Brother and Survivor which are on their 100^th cycle. I watched the first season of both Big Brother and Survivor, they were masterpieces… putting people in that kind of physical and emotional turmoil then turning on a cam recorder, was simply genius. However like a good joke told too many times, its gone sour.

Not for test taking, huh? Your washroom is breeding Bolsheviks.

fuck off.

I had been under once before, with Wulf, but this was FiViL’s first time out. That first run was a rather dull trip through featureless RCP whose most interesting feature was that it ran under the graveyard(no bodies though), this time however, was much different.

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