Merry Christ... we don't even know when... mas!

I love Christmas.

In a pagan kind of way... in a family-come-together-celebrate kind of way, in a I-get-to-go-home-way, in a give-me-some-fucking-presents kind of way, in a spread-some-awesome-love kind of way. Short: in the way in which everyone should love it. Maybe not exclusively, but definitely includingly (not a word, not a problem)!

I mean, we celebrate it - and it's kind of Christian, cause it has "Christ" in it - but in the end we barely know + - 10 years when Jesus was born. So how come we are so certain it's today?

So let's all enjoy it, atheists and non-atheists (achm... Christians!) of the western world (or eastern, if you wanna come along for shits + giggles)! Because it's awesome and it's positive. And it is a great opportunity to have some time off and spend it with family, friends, and partying with those.

And good wine.

Good Night and Merry Christmas to the whole lotta ya'll!

Post scriptum:

Love it, cause Hitler can't steal your seat anymore!

If you fly...

Hope for a blue sky.

Kansas City to Cincinnati delayed,

Mechanical error they said.

Flight to Paris fled, instead

In Cincinnati I stayed.

Cincinnati, woman in blue said,

"It was the weather's fault.

Therefore: you pay. Default!"

I pay and hang my head.

"At least Business class tomorrow,"

I think and go to sleep.

Next day, DELAY AGAIN, I weep.

In Atlanta I land, 10 minutes from sorrow.

I run and climb and sweat and curse.

Arrive at the gate and see my plane!

But the doors are closed and I strain

My voice to make my claim

That I need to be on this plane.

My pleas in vain, oh what a shame,

Another plane left and I remain.

Another woman in blue, and I converse.

"My plane left without me!"

"I understand, rebooking in progress.

No flight tonight, but do not stress,

Maybe tomorrow, or Tuesday."

"Tuesday you say!? 2 more day!?"

"It is the weather! Hotel! You pay!"

"I will not pay, there is no way!"

"The Woman in Red, I guess,

Has more power, less stress."

To the Woman in Red I flee.

"There are no flights,

but what do you claim?

The flight from KC is to blame?

A mechanical error you say it was?

Records say, 'Maintenance was the cause.'

They made you pay? A shame!

Hotel on us, glad you came."

Savior in Red, 2 free nights.

Hotel is nice, friendly, and large.

In my room, a flat screen TV.

And also, on floor three,

A gym, free of charge.

I hope to be,

In Germany,

With family,

By Christmas.

Lev says it for me...

This pretty much sums up how I feel about this topic fairly well:

He probably did!

I haven't posted in almost a month.

Nothing really new to report, except that more people need to appreciate this:

Save money. Die better. Walmart

The Craziest Thing I Ever Heard...

Recently in class here at William Jewell, one of my fellow student talked about a religious practice in some cult. That student said it was, "the weirdest thing I ever heard about."

This provoked me to think about "the weirdest/craziest thing I ever heard about." It was also religion related and came as a little revelation (sarcasm, maybe) to me. Most certainly do I believe that there are a lot of crazy people, cults, and communities out there. They do crazy stuff and embrace their crazy s*** as super awesome pastime activities. But are those crazy things (killing each other, killing their children, eating each other - get as crazy as you want, let your mind wander and I bet someone or even some group did it) the "craziest things I ever heard about?"

Nope, because the premise for this to happen is that there are a couple of kooks out there that unite to do some crazy s***tuff (I just really feel like conforming to the American censorship of language and not swear so much right now). As mentioned above, it's a given that there are some nuts out there. So, do these lunatics and their actions surprise me? Maybe the creativity they come up with new s*** to do, but that's about it. Every toddler has access to the internet and can read up all the crazy s***, nothing new most of the times. So, what are "the craziest things I ever heard about?"

I quickly (much quicker than it took me to write those last two paragraphs or it took you to read them) came to the conclusion that my motivation for many posts in this blog are due to the craziest s*** I ever heard about. It's the creationists and literal-truth-of-the-bible movement. The craziest s*** I ever heard about has to be based on more than just some few lunatics, because that might be totally out of the social norm, but - as mentioned - enacted by nut-jobs. The creationist movement is a huge movement that - in large parts - consists of fairly well educated individuals with the ability for critical though processes (when it comes to anything BUT religion). It is deeply rooted in a 21st century, 1st world country that happens to be considered to be one of the prime examples of industrial evolution ("Evolution!" Oh, sweet irony). One of the - maybe the - most powerful countries in the world.

1/3 of this industrialized, highly educated people embraces a view as "the absolute truth" that has been disproven for more than 150 years and was strongly in doubt several years before it's Episode II was even written (6th century BCE).

Ultimately I think that how "crazy" something is has to be measured not only by how much it contradicts our current perception of what a social norm is (I do think eating each other is more crazy than believing in a being that makes stuff appear. Whenever, wherever, without any proof except an old book) but also by how many people follow it.

My formula for overall general craziness of an action/belief goes something like this:

Degree of Craziness = [(Number of People Involved + Number of People Killed) * Discord with Social Norms] - Weighted Scientific Evidence that Actions/Beliefs were/are Necessary for Society

You can see how in my - I think - fairly rational formula many crazy actions quickly move towards a freakin' high degree of craziness. At first I wanted to divide by the "Scientific Evidence" factor, but then thought better of it, as most even just moderately crazy stuff would be considered "impossibly crazy" as we would have to divide by "0."

So let's test the formula with an example!

30 alien-loving cult members kill themselves on the roof of a skyscraper on New Year's 99-2000.

Variables:

Discord with Social Norms (Standardized scale of 1-10, 10 being highest discord) - Killing oneself:

7 - pretty crazy, but not excessively punished by law.

Number of people involved:

30

Number of people killed:

30

Scientific Evidence:

0 - fairly indiscernible right now, but so far I think it's fair to assume that there was/is/will be not a lot of evidence supporting this to be the way to awesomeness.

[(30 + 30) * 7] - 0 = 420

From this first experiment I would say that anything above 100 can be considered pretty crazy.

Very scientific, I know.

I will leave you with this for now. I encourage anyone and anything to try this formula and see if you can come up with interesting results, prove it totally wrong, or improve it!

Also, I encourage an exercise of the mind... looking at how crazy the "literal Christians" movement is. Don't forget to include empirical data of the last couple millennia. As soon as I have another hour to spare, I will try to write a post looking at that.

My Motivation

Haven't been writing in a while.

Am planning on two big posts that will come once I get a little more time here at Jewell... busy bee.

For all German-speaking friends, this is my motivation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdNt3hgIYuI

Westboro Baptist Church is pretty close to where I was living for the first 2 years in the U.S.

English speaking friends. You know the Church, you know they are nuts, I just felt like pointing out some extremists that take it all a little extremer.

:)

Back to my essays, papers, readings.

Quickly... and Inglourious Basterds

Yeah, I am at William Jewell College now.

So far it's going really good. Baseball and classes started of good, and so on and on and on...

I know this is not really what people come to read Blogs for. If they come at all. But also, this is not what I want my Blog to be for. So... here we go!

I watched the Tarantino movie Inglourious Basterds the other day and I really loved it. It easily surpasses most of the other movies he has done. While I think it surpasses Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs as well, it doesn't really do it very easily, and probably it only surpasses them in my own little world of movie-rankings because by now I watched P. F. and R. D. too often.

Anyways... I decided to write a quick review with a special focus on how it handles German culture and the whole "Hollywood movies + German Nazis" problems. Cause, as most of you hopefully know/realized, most of the time this simple addition is solved to "= lets shoot some fucking Germans that are really stupid and evil."

Seriously, most of the times I feel like if you want to do a movie where a lot of people get shot and it's awesome to shoot them, either make them German Nazis or Zombies.

In his newest movie Inglourious Basterds Tarantino depicts Nazi Germany and it’s people with an amount of respect and detail that I wouldn’t have expected from him or any major Hollywood production. While I greatly despise the acts of the Nazi regime, I also despise the many shallow movie presentations of the German people, the reduction of German culture to angry sounding people that really need to be shot as fast and as numerous as possible.

Nazi Germany is a topic for itself and that every Nazi should have been stopped is out of the question. What impresses me so much about Tarantino’s most recent endeavour is that he manages to connect his well-know love for gore and violence with a great deal of atmosphere and respectful treatment of Germans. The movie is based on the premise of a group out to kill as many Nazis as possible, but at the same time it involves an enormous amount of German spoken language by an impressive selection of famous and great German actors.

It is very apparent throughout the whole movie that Tarantino and his crew put great effort and man-power into adjusting the script so it would involve German culture in a great amount, not to mention the flawless German that was scripted and consequently spoken. Little details like the way Germans show the number “3” compared to how Americans do it play essential roles in the movie.

All these factors adding up in the movie make not just a great movie, but also communicate a cultural responsibility and awareness that I have rarely experienced in any WW2/Nazi movies, especially ones coming from the U.S.

The movie is by no means primary or secondary a cultural work meant to establish tolerance and understanding, but between the lines (or the pictures/sound) one can clearly see how it can establish more distinctive and multi-faceted perceptions of (Nazi-) Germany.

If you guys want to know more about what is going on with me mail me, facebook me, studivz me, reply here, yell it off a mountain.

All the stuff that I don't really feel like posting here, are just things like moving out of my apartment, a light pulled hamstring, and cafeteria food. Not very intellectually intriguing or interesting to read for anyone but - probably - my parents. Although I doubt even they would be blown away by narratives about aforementioned events.


I want to leave you with the thought that I had about how - while I really liked I. B. (watch out, I feel a long tangent coming... oooohhh, here it comes: isn't it funny how all Tarantino movies, directed by him, seem to be just two words? Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill, Death Proof, Inglourious Basterds. Awesome.) - it seems to me that Tarantino is unable to develop a deeper connection to characters?

I liked most of the characters in the movie a lot and they were really well played and everything. But when they died (which almost all of them in good Tarantino fashion did) I didn't really feel sad.

It really strikes me with I.B. a lot more than with other movies by him because I. B. is more about atmosphere, actors, and characters than about referencing older movies and being super awesome cool shooting people in the face yeah bitch.

If you feel like it, yell what you think off a mountain.

Leaving.

PPE (post-publishing-edit):

Oh yeah, I also made a new video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bt8isqQRiM

Proband M012

"HaHa, look, there is a doctor in the picture with you!"

I am sitting in a hospital in Cologne, Germany. I am not sick and nothing is wrong with me, which makes this scenario really weird.

I wasn’t able to find any decent jobs for the first 3 weeks here, so I decided to participate in a medical trial. It pays well and it’s totally harmless. But it still comfortably ranks among the most uncomfortable jobs I ever did (right up there with a job I once had setting up a stage and was working on building a tower in 10m height without any safety equipment).

The uncomfortable feeling doesn’t come from a imminent danger for my physical health (like pulling up huge speakers up a shaky tower) but rather it is a weird psychological strain.

Coming into this microcosm that is the medical trial world, I really didn’t know what to expect. The people that work here seem to feel overqualified for their work (really just laying catheters and handing out the pills and food at the right time) and the ones that are the test objects seem to feel shame at seemingly being underqualified for any other job.

There are some people who hide this shame behind bedazzled purple shirts and big sunglasses and others that act like they don’t need the money, showing up suited up and with a small carry-on suitcase as if they were about to have a business flight to L.A. for 2 days.
All hail advancements in medicine! - my ass.

And then there is me. Showing up here in my absolute average clothing and a backpack filled with books, my laptop, and a small ensemble of chargers [iPod, electronic clippers (why the fuck did I take them for 2 days of medical trial?), MacBook, cell phone]. What I learned too late was that they didn’t give us any clothing or towels… or for that matter anything but catheters, small amounts of food, warm carbonated water bottles, and strict limits of when to drink, eat, walk, sit.

I even called before I came here to ask what I needed to bring. “Hmm, nothing really.” Now I am spending 2 days straight in the same clothes.
Visitors only in emergencies.

On top of that, out of obvious necessity, I am currently successfully and quiet consciously ignoring my fear of needles that had me passing out in doctors office already twice in my life. But the thought of that catheter in my hand still gives me shivers and makes me cling my toes. Constant thoughts about this dreadful device along the lines of…
One wrong move and it will poke out of the side of your skin. What keeps it from scraping and poking into my forearm bone and tissue when I make a wrong move? Can this fucking doctor stop wiggling it around like a 7-year old trying to get all out of his milkshake?
… keep popping into my head.

The "catheter", or "I.V.", or shitty-ass bloodsucking device.

Talking about milkshakes… I am seriously starting to feel this whole “being sucked empty” as a very real sensation. Every hour several nurses/doctors (who fucking knows?) walk around collecting small doses of blood from all of “us” - 24 patients (all male). Although they are trying to be nice and give the impression that we are not just mere test-mice, it doesn’t change that they employ all the same moves and sentences with everyone.
“Are you feeling alright?”
“Wow, it’s getting really warm today!”
“Maybe we should lay a new catheter.” FUCK!

Also, I keep saying “thank you” once they are done taking my blood. I really don’t know why I say that. It just freaks me out, that they wiggle the catheter around, poke it in and out, push on it and pull it up. I am probably just really thankful once they are done.

It’s not all bad though, I don’t want to be all whiny about it. I get to spent 2 days in bed doing nothing but surfing the Internetz (sadly slow AS FUCK, so not really pleasurable), reading books (Augusten Burroughs - A Wolf At The Table | Great read!) and I was able to get How I Met Your Mother (Season 1-4) from my mother before I came here. So I am basically breezing through the seasons like no ones business. I think I already watched over 8 hours of Barney, Ted, Marshall, Lily and Robin falling in and out of love/beds.

A sense of a little parallel world with new friends is starting to set in. But I am not yet in love with any of the characters from the show. Which is really bewildering me. Everyone who has known me for a while knows why.

Maybe I will throw The O.C. back on my laptop next week for the second cycle of this testing.


I wish I could watch The O.C. all new all over again.
Fuck Anakin.

Yeah, that’s the thought I am leaving you with.
Yeah, that’s right!
Yeah, that’s right!

Who is more scary?

I am back in Germany. Hooray!

Still, here I am currently watching a video from a TV show called "Fault Lines."

As my theme here has steadily been religion in the U.S. from my viewpoint and from what I hear and think about I absolutely had to quickly write about this.

Here is a link to part 1 of the episode:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TME6X9LQ4y8

It is about the indoctrination of religious extremists in the U.S. military and I think it is a legitimate question to ask...

Is a world power with the largest military capabilities (by far) and christian extremists deeply entrenched in it's rows more scary/dangerous
THAN
A group of terrorizers (yeah, I just watched Harold and Kumar - Escape from G.B. again... it was on TV give me a break!) that has neither the financial means nor the amount of "soldiers" to be a real threat to a whole country? (<-- the long awaited questionmark. 2 years of almost exclusively writing english still are unable to keep me from writing irresponsible, reader-killing, ridiculously sentences like this one right here right now. Thanks for reading.)

9/11 was horrible, vicious, despicable, and totally evil.

But I am scared that western civilization is quietly accepting (or not moving against) a religious extremist movement that proclaims their way (namely evangelical Christianity) as the "right" one and the other (Islam) as the wrong one.
And that also is horrible, despicable, evil, and really fucking stupid. It's another prime example of the "black and white"-world that I have been pointing out as so dangerous in earlier posts.

This time it's really actually dangerous physically and not just a totally messed up mind set.

Maybe more later. Right now I am watching in awe and with a scaringly high amount of non-surprisedness (yeah, I can make up words. So what? I am German. We do it all the time.).


Post scriptum:
Currently I am wondering if there is a function that will enable the average reader who is sick of my paranthesis-comments to just blend them out automatically? Maybe I just invented the NEXT GOOGLE/YOUTUBE/TWITTER/FILL IN THE BLANK ______.
A giant new awesome thing that everyone will totally use all the time and I can then sell to some company like Yahoo or Microsoft or (preferably) Apple for like approx. $2.5 billion.
Maybe...?

Kevin Devine and such...

So, I am still on a family RV trip around Lake Michigan. The weather is horrific but this amazing 21st-century-embracing camping site has WiFi.

I thought I'd give you a couple of pictures and a good song/good song lyrics.

A couple of weeks ago (May 26th) my mother, Katie, Katie's brother (David), the singer of The Get Up Kids, and me attended a small (approx. 50 people) concert in Lawrence (this sentence definitely has too many brackets/parentheses). I never heard of the guy (Kevin Devine) but it was a concert and it was in Lawrence and it was 1 day after my mother had arrived, so I figured - after listening to one of his songs online - that we shall go see him. So we did.

And it was a lot of great fun. Here is a picture my mother took at the concert:


And here is one of his songs which was REALLY great live but sadly not as good on the Album and not as good on YouTube. Live he played it with the whole band and it was really good stuff.

Also, when you click this you will find lyrics to that same song that are just as good non-live as they were live (another proof to why lyrics are so fucking important :) ).

Here are a couple of pictures from our trip:

Katie and me playing a round of golf in Lawrence. What else?

At Royals vs. Tigers game

Mother and sister meet again.

Dinner in Chi-Town.

A homeless guy singing "Somewhere over the Rainbow" in a Chicago subway station.

Where The Wild Things Are


Family at Bleachers in Wrigley Field

Find Mo/Jo/Mom! We are on ESPN! Hooray.

A little bit of baseball at Wayland Academy

Cheesehead-Mo

Canoeing on Lake Michigan

So long and thanks for all the fish.



P.S.:
I found an amazing new (?) function on facebook that allows me to have this Blog published in facebook notes AUTO-fucking-MATICALLY! If that is not the greatest invention since the light bulb then I don't know what is, snitches! Facebook wins.

Dear Internets,

I know I have been kind of on and off with you in the last couple of days. But look at my dedication now!

Here I am sitting in a trailer park laundry room just to spend a couple of bytes with you.

And now, when my disappointment over not enough e-mails from mere mortals kicks in, I understand that your way of telling me that I am missed is through a list of YouTube subscription updates I can work my way through. Then I turn on my iTunes and the podcast updates seem to just flow in (actually stumble in most of the times due to bad-trailer-park-internets - you have to work on that!) and give me new pleasures.

Twitter has shown a total disregard to my existence and catching up is utopian. Facebook seems to be just fine without me (which breaks my heart after all the hours and days I spent with it). At least my fantasy baseball teams seem to have a sincere longing for my time and effort.

So, I will try betterment knowing that the future is dark as most trailer parks seem to neglect you and rather elect to live in a world of seclusion, pain and suffering.

I will bring you pictures from my mothers facebook albums, I will print out what you need me to print, I will update my status on twitter, I will update my status on facebook, I will keep neglecting my MoSpace, I will look up when the Marlins won the World Series again on Wikipedia, I will also google what the fuck these power plants at Lake Michigan are up to, I will keep my Azureus running as long as I can, I will catch up with The Onion, and now I will leave you tonight for a better tomorrow.

Good night Internets. Although I know you never sleep and always watch over me and my binaries.

Mo.

Some Personal Updates

Ok, a little less religion and a little more "What the fuck is Mo doing?"

Right now I am sitting in a Best Western in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin where my mom and me pick up my sister from the school she attended this year.

Yesterday we had a 10 hour drive up here from Ottawa.

I will push my facebook-agenda again a little bit. My mom has a great photo-album about our trip on there. Get an account, check it out. :)

Other than that I don't think I have too much to say right now.
ESPN needs my attention.

Biased towards Evolution

This is slowly but steadily turning into a religious blog. Who would have thought?

To continue on from where I stopped earlier, please check out this awesome video that gives a really nice insight into how early spread and deeply rooted the believes in creationism are in some communities in the U.S.
"54 Million people do not believe in evolution"

I mean, most schools here are not even allowed to teach evolution and then the parents/these preachers teach creationism to the kid.
I love the quote, "It makes sense, it's just easy to explain to your children."

The danger is not just that it's totally fucking crazy to declare "war" or science or say evolution is a religion, but that kind of thinking promotes a irrational, simplified, black and white world view. And that from the earliest ages on.

That is just really dangerous and leads to a set back in human evolution. Oh wait. Evolution is bullshit, so progress is bullshit.
The bible says it all, so let's build a little house, praise the lord, go to heaven, and pity the fool who will most certainly end up in hell.

Hell will be fucking packed with an awful lot of awesome folks and heaven will be a stinky place with douche-bags that ended up being right. Fuck that!

Diary/Dump

So, I was talking to a friend of mine about Religion - seems to be the dominant topic here now - today and it turned into a quite heated argument, nothing that wasn't accurately covered in the blog entry from Wednesday though.

A severe weather warning was out and we just got done throwing on the Baseball field when our argument started. As we argued the heaven got darker and darker, the winds got heavier and some slight thunder noises in the distance could be heard. We argued on and the storm got closer. At one point we abandoned our discussion when we thought a Tornado was forming above our heads.

Half joking and half sincere we both pointed out how it seemed that god was getting really upset with me. After we gotten inside the storm really started picking up and it pored down like crazy.

It was pretty funny, and I am now a full-blown religion-is-awesome man!

No, I am not.

2 hours later I watched this fucked up shit...

...

... yeah, definitely not going to happen.


I also really want to start Video Blogging, but I think my skill of what could be interesting has not transcended the process of writing it in a Blog yet.

3 Easy Ways to Make it to Heaven

I have a lot of very emotional and heated debates with some people here at Ottawa University about religion. I think, because I come from a completely different spectrum of belief systems but still from a similar western-industrialized lifestyle, both sides, me and them, have a hard time even grasping the other persons ideals.

The first time ever I was exposed to a person that believed every word in the bible to be the plain truth (for sake of simplicity I will just refer to those views as creationist views) was several years ago, when a baseball player from New Mexico told me that dinosaur bones were buried in the ground by evil scientist. I was struck and couldn’t believe that a person actually could be this paranoid and uneducated while from a alleged educated country.

Here at OU I meet people with those believes deeply rooted in them every day. They are my close friends, and everything I do with them is absolutely normal. But at one point or another we come to points in our discussions where their and my believes shine through. It turns into a heated discussion that most times ends with both sides agreeing that the other person is a total idiot. That’s mostly what I was ever able to accomplish in these conversations.

While I try to pose questions that are absolutely logical, it just seems that logic doesn’t apply to a talk as soon as it is about god or religion to these friends of mine. Everything else (psychology of others, sports, some physics, some biology) is possible to be discussed on a very rational and logical basis.

I started to really try to see it from their point of view, but many arguments are just totally not working. They argue with me, that everything in the afterlife will be awesome for people who believe and that I will end up in eternal damnation for the lack of my believe. As soon as I then question how their god can be loving and do that to a perfectly fine human like me or other non-believers, they can’t really give me any satisfying explanation besides that “god’s ways are higher than ours.” So basically, they would argue with me to a certain point and as soon as a dead-end in their argumentation is reached, they pull out either the “faith” or “higher ways” card that is absolutely impossible to argue with.

I respect Christianity and religion in general. But when it comes to views that are dangerous because they imply not the ideals of loving thy neighbor or thy family or thy whoever, but rather “watch out for your own ass” and “the only love that counts is your love to god” or other imaginary friends, than I only see that ending badly.

The way they can justify these extremist views to themselves are through disregarding science and calling science “just books” when I call the bible “just a book.” It’s an absolutely frustratingly doubt-proof system that protects itself from three different ways of attack.

First it protects itself through claiming a bigger picture that’s not understandable for us. That would already be a nice enough way out of every discussion, but it would make all conversations a little too plain.

Secondly it protects through disregarding human accomplishments and findings that are not coherent with the bible as evil and just plain false/fake; without realizing that you really can’t disregard parts of science and still respect other parts – evolution is a religion has to be one of the top 5 stupidest things I have heard in my lifetime, Jesus riding dinosaurs being number 1 because of the awesome hilarity factor.

Thirdly, and most scaring, is the fact that if the first two explanations happen to fail to protect them from an incoherent/blasphemic view, fear takes over. Sometimes I hear, “I see where you are getting at, but I am scared that if I think about this further, I am going to have to go to hell.” I am not going to go into depth about how this is really messed up and controversial in so countless ways. After this statement a dropping of the whole subject will most certainly ensue because ignorance is a bliss that will still enable you to make it to heaven.

My favorite question right now: If god is almighty, can he make a stone that is so heavy, that even he can’t lift it? (Thanks to my godfather for this question – I don’t have a god, but do have a godfather, hooray) The replies I get are priceless and so perfectly following the three protection methods mentioned above.

Message of Faith

I didn't think I would ever write one, but this Sunday in Newspaper production the Message of Faith needed to be written.
I got assigned to do it quickly.

15 minutes later:

Faith is a interesting word. It has two main ways of being defined. Most popularly or commonly it is understood in the context of religion. Faith in a deity, many deities, or in something similarly supernatural. But it can also be the faith in a person - reliability and trustworthiness – the sincerity of ones intentions.

My message of faith is the message of the latter. I never had a lot of use for faith in a spiritual sense, which I don’t deem as a good, better, or smarter attitude than people who have faith. All I can deem it as is my view and sometimes – especially in times of hardship – I wish I had faith in something spiritual. It seems to be very soothing and comforting for many people.

But I have always been scared of the spiritual faith, because it seems irrational to me. And how some people feel about blasphemy or disrespect towards their g(G)od(s) I feel about irrationally. So, I guess I have a distinct faith in rationality, logic, and science, which consequently is a strong faith in doubt.

Back to the “other” faith. I feel many faithful people to be projecting their faith on a deity because of the lack of being able to have that same faith in a person. When one does not know the sincerity of intentions of people around him/her, they can quickly be led to trusting books and imaginary friends (that are ultimately shaped by the individual) more. Deities just tend to be more reliable.

So, ultimately, I think my message of faith is to have more trust in the person next to you. If you have been hurt a lot and feel driven away from trust and faith in other mortals, try to rethink. No matter whether there is an afterlife or not, right now you are here with the people around you. While this life lasts (and it might be the only one you have) you should try to make it work. And almost any other person tries to do the same.

If we live in a world full of individuals, then we live in a world full of people that reflect on their own actions and that ultimately strive towards happiness. How messed up those ways can sometimes be is indisputable, but I think you can always count the good intentions. No one acts to be unhappy, and if they do, they do in unconsciously.

And that’s where communication and faith comes in. Trust other people like you trust yourself and you might get hurt, but you will be able to tell yourself that you can still trust. Reward of trust by far outweighs the negative of being hurt once in a while. And if you can’t see that, I will dare you to try. We are creatures of habit and mirroring, and if our habit becomes trusting, we will experience that same trust mirrored back to us more and more.


For more stuff that's in our Newspaper (and some more of my articles):
www.thecampusnewspaper.com

Movie! Documentary! Vampires! Dinosaurs!

Hach, good old Hellogoodbye references.

I haven't been dating up for a longer time, and it has not been due to lack of activities.
On the contrary.

But now slowly the time starts, where things get slower. And therefore I will slowly update you with what has been happening and is happening.

Let me begin the blogging month of May with a bang.

BANG! - Here is a video I did for a class where we needed to tackle a social issue. It consumed a lot of my day and night time over the last week (actually the week before that), but I think for putting it together in 2 weeks it turned out pretty good.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-check it out, wha-wha-wha-wha-what's it all about:

This is clickable and will turn into a documentary!


Tell me what you guys think!

Binary's Prayer

Our Internet in www.,

Hallowed be your URL,
Your websites come,
Your bandwidth be done,
On PCs as on Macs.
Give us today our daily bytes.
Forgive us our MySpace-accounts
as we forgive facebook-chat downtime.
And lead us not unto LimeWire
But deliver us from Torrents.

For thine is the webspace,
and the broadband, and the FTPs,
for ever and ever.

[I wrote this in a facebook note a couple of weeks ago. Needs to be on my blog!
I bet there is one like this already written somewhere. Which affirms the beauty of our web.
I felt like I needed to write one anyways.]

MoRants - Global Warming!?

For the people that are on facebook:
This is the same as the facebook note.

I think I will start a series called "MoRants" where I rant about different topics that I give a minor or major fuck about. Everyday I am surprised by the way my name lends itself to be mushed into nice phrases or themes. (People that are my friend on MySpace can account for that due to my ridiculously awesome nickname MoSpace)

MoRant 1.1 - Here we go:

So, we still haven't been swept from this planet due to massive floods.
Actually, the weather still seems pretty fucking normal.

While I was driving through the Kansas countryside (endless), I thought about this again.
If we really influence weather that much, if we are really able to influence it negatively, shouldn't we start to be able to influence it positively? No, because the scale is waaaaaaaayyyy to fucking big. We can't build even close to a big enough A/C. We actually already have issues heating/cooling stadiums properly.

Then I thought about how 71% of the earth is covered with water. So... 29% is land... awesome math! I couldn't find an exact number of how much of that is covered by civilization. But 1/8 of the earth surface is inhabitable by humans. That means, we can - theoretically - occupy 12.5 % of the earth! That's not a lot. It's a small piece of the pie were we even live.

What also is not a big part of the earth, is the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere.
0.038% of the atmosphere is made up of CO2.
Interestingly enough, 95% of the CO2 that gets send up to those 0.038% is absolutely natural and has nothing to do with humans what-so-ever. While the existence of CO2 is important for the greenhouse effect, it does not drive temperature. And... it's a really fucking small percentage of the atmosphere.

See some of my slides that I did for a environmental literature class attached.

My main source is Wikipedia. I know that it's not a legitimate source, but I dare (or actually ask) you to prove me wrong with more legit sources.
Plus:
http://networks.silicon.com/webwatch/0,39024667,39155109,00.htm

I think the biggest issue about this is, that many western nations spent billions to cut their emissions (I don't like emissions, don't get me wrong) while people all over the world still starve to death. Really... what are our fucking priorities here?


Next time in "Mo rants about the world":

Why the U.S. needs 5.500 nuclear warheads when it takes around 40 to kill every living thing on earth!
(+ "Between 1940 and 1996, the U.S. spent at least $5.8 trillion (in 1996 dollars) on nuclear weapons development. [...] $365 billion was spent on nuclear waste management and environmental remediation.")

East/West Germussia

So, I have not really been updating like I wanted.
I hate introductory sentences like that. They are such a fucking turnoff.

Right now I am working on an interesting project for a class. A 5 minute documentary about deaf students and deaf athletes.
I hope I will be done with the editing by next week and then I will put it up on YouTube and some webspace and share it with you guys!

Other than that, we have 4 conference games left and our chances of making it into the conference tournament are dim, but we are not eliminated just yet.

Yesterday I went lifting with a good friend of mine. We chatted about geography (for whatever reason), and he told me he hasn't had geography since 6th grade. So I made him draw a map of the world.
Besides forgetting Australia completely, still dividing Germany in west and east and putting it into north-central Russia, and drawing Mexico bigger than all of Europe, his map was actually surprisingly accurate for 6th grader knowledge. I wish I had a scanner.

By any means, I ain't no geography master myself. I think my major knowledge of the shape and location of the continents comes from Risk. Still I found his map amusing and had to share this.

It's Easter!

And that means, a happy Jesus Zombie Day to the whole lot of you!


http://www.zombiejesusday.org/

Transformer-Car

Today my car turned into a Transformer.


It fulfills all criteria:
- It's big
- It's badass
- It has a badass driver
- On occasion it transforms to a giant robot that protects the world from evil

Now all it needs is a name.
Any ideas are welcome.

The other day...

I heard someone in Wal-Mart say:
"How funny would it be, if someone would life in a Wal-Mart!?
...
I mean, you definitely could."

Definitely.

And I think many would think it is not just funny, but a possibly awesome, better life.
That thought is kind of fucked up.

In the spirit of...

... reviving this Blog, I will try to keep up with keeping it somewhat-borderline-as-close-as-it-can-get-to current.
Ramblings included.

So, my new favorite pastime that I discovered "the other day" (isn't it a great saying? THE other day. A specific "the" and a very unspecific "other" and still it gets the message across -> I do not know when but it wasn't too long ago) is listening to Propagandhi songs whilst reading their lyrics and user-interpretations at:
http://www.songmeanings.net/songs/view/3530822107858763041/
(The song that these lyrics and interpretations belong to is this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mifjRigUTVQ)
This particular song in a way touched me, still a ravaging meat-absorber, and almost made me question my innate consumption of cheap Wal-Mart meat. Almost.
I think everyone should do a little bit of listening to interesting bands while reading the lyrics everyday. It makes a lot more clear and your - other - day more interesting.

The other thing I wanted to talk about goes into a similar way. I read something and then consume a different media-medium with the same name/similar content.
I borrowed the graphic novel Watchmen from a friend (Jeremiah - www.myspace.com/jeremiahvedder - his blog) before I went to watch the movie. Have never heard about the novel until the movie came out (blasphemy! unworthy non-dork!) but was interested in graphic novels ever since Seth from the O.C. kept babbling about how it is literature and not plain cartoons and by rambling about it somehow got Summer to fall for him (a feat I have not yet accomplished).
So, I went on and read the book in - for myself - incredible record time of 2 1/2 days and really enjoyed it. I then went on to watch the movie.
Very similar, thus similarly good.
Today I went to the Comic Con with Jeremiah and Cyrus (http://olivercomics.com/) and looked at geeky people, Playmates, Storm-Troopers, Chewy, Iron Man and lots more interesting things. I also picked up a complete collection of "V" for Vendetta which I am reading right now - well, not right now, as you can tell - and am getting ready to watch the movie once I finished the book.

This is all a mere stating of facts of what I am "doing" with my life right now, but this is what a blog is all about, right? Maybe I will get into this and more colorful posts will follow, but for now I remain with the holes and hope my bridge stays on.
(I did a google search for "for now I remain with" looking for nice ways to end a text in English and I got that as a result.
Heavy words, light on meaning. Google for the win.)

Reviving this Blog

I know I haven't updated here for a while.
And most of you will now be wondering why I am writing in English.

Well, I want to start making this a "international" blog. Which ties in nicely with my new-found ambition to update this bitch regularly. I hope I can keep up on it.

So let me get going:

I decided to restart my Blog now, at a time where my K-key on my keyboard is broke.
How am I using it then? It is very loosely attached and might fall off any second. If it does, you will start to realize, that I am using an awful lot of words without "k" or I will replace a K with the symbol ∆ which makes no sense what-so-ever but is closely located to the spot "k" would normally be (alt+ J-key) and looks pretty fucking cool.
So far so good, K in place.

I don't know if this will turn into a long elaboration but bare with me. It might be entertaining, it might be a bunch of useless info, it might be a little of both or it might be a complete waste of time. You won't know until you've been through it.

Since my last e-Mail and/or blog update obviously a lot of things have happened. I will not even try to ma∆e an effort, as I wouldn't be able to cover nearly enough anyways.
Therefore I will just state some recent developments.
Baseball season is well on its way. It is not going well at all though. Lately we have been doing better so there is reason to believe we will be able to finish the season on a good note (isn't it incredible how rarely the ∆-letter is used in the English language, my German friends?).

Here a video of me throwing a bullpen:




School has been going fine and has been almost as easy as always.
Really nothing new there.

I have found a new little project to wor∆ on outside of school though! I am right now in the process of translating this great article into English:
http://www.zeit.de/2009/04/DOS-Missouri
I am in contact with the original author of the piece and will try to get the final translation published in some big-ass magazines/newspapers. Will see if that wor∆s out, but go big or go home... or something li∆e that.

Here a picture of me being a Jedi:

Yes, I am carrying Yoda on my bac∆ and yes, I am wearing Monty Python's ∆iller Rabbit Slippers © ®.
Awesome? Yes.

When I turned 23 I got this ca∆e from ∆atie who is awesome for giving me a birthday ca∆e:
I couldn't help but eat a piece before I too∆ a picture. In case you are really fuc∆ing stupid, it read "Baseball".

I also got a ca∆e from Chrissy, but after enjoying two pieces of it, I forgot it at her place and haven't been able to get it bac∆ since. I hope she and her roommate enjoyed it.

The biggest highlight of my recent days (and maybe my life... maybe...) was:


Yippie! Yeah! Awesome!

Here is a video I too∆ of the heroes of my never ending childhood:


I thin∆ this is more than enough for now.
I genuinely hope to be able to ∆eep you guys updated here on a regular basis.

If you seriously want to stay up-to-date with what I am doing 24/7 though, I recommend faceboo∆, where I basically spend all my wa∆ing hours, or subscribing to my Twitter (Mo9er) which I update with interesting little things as soon as interesting little things pop up.

Than∆s for reading,

Moses.

PS: This is my roommates dog:
It is the only dog to ever be allowed on my arm, in my room or to even lic∆ my chin. Because it is a super cute, not stin∆y, fuc∆ing cute little dog.
All people who ∆now how much I disli∆e dogs, will understand what a big deal this is.