thought for the day

I agree. I tend to not read or watch news at all, although I do like to surf through various news websites (the Beeb, Yahoo, etc.) just to see what their different 'angles' are. The problem is, as you say, they paint a very bleak picture, which depresses the hell out of me. They neglect to point out that, every single day, someone somewhere helps someone else; nice things happen, people fall madly in love, a flower grows up through the cracks in the pavement in a downtrodden area, etc. Good news isn't exciting. Except for Britney's baby, I suppose, but is that actually good news?

Well life is getting better and better for more people everyday... They have less to worry about on day to day survival which means the vacuum (these powerful brains have to be occupied after all) has to be taken up with trivialities and entertainments... imagination is of increasing importance. On a complete aside, I don't buy the view that life has reached some ultimate state of perfection that has now to be defended at all costs, lest we destroy it... I think those who believe thus are inadvertantly taking a very short sighted human centric view of life on this planet. (Imagine swinging into our galaxy in your space craft coming from afar and seeing how vulnerable this remarkable blue/green planet is. A sitting duck for a meteor, or even a 'natural' earth borne catastrophe to wipe out the result of millions of years of evolution, in an instant. When will we ever learn that it is the forces of nature that we ought to fear? Step back from the aeons and it is clear that the next 'step' for life is to move off this tiny island planet and spread into the galaxy and beyond. How is it going to do that without humans doing more of what they are already doing today? We are the first species to place any 'value' on life in the first place, there will be mistakes made yet ultimately it us 'humans' armed with this mavellous thing called conciousness that will pave the way for the future of life, if it is going to have any. Life as we know it is only part of the way towards unimaginable diveristy that will continue to happen through a combination of technology and evolution. I can never understand those who divorce what humans do (yes, including technology) from this great project of as I see it. We should be proud as a species of what we have achieved thus far and humble yet at the challenges that lie ahead if we are going to achieve what our genes are driving us to do.

hummm.. Is this a mass suicide pack? Wrong thread for me I think.

If Zhengzhou zoo is anything like Beijing Zoo an early death from lung cancer is probably the best option.

We are social animals, funky. What the 'pack' says can be very important, especially if one hasn't been given the tools to think critically about whether what the pack thinks is actually true.

I saw an interview with Jane Goodall in which she admitted that feeding the bananas had caused changes to the chimps behaviour, and more than one interviewed scientist claimed that the feeding was the cause. I think the behaviours that you and I mentioned, WW, arose after the project ended and the feeding ended or was reduced. These behaviours had never been recorded before by Jane, and she was horrified to see what happened. I call this phenomenon "box disease". It happens when you put rats in a box with a limited food supply, and when you put people on a planet with an uneven distribution of resources. They just fight it out. This sounds very doom and gloom I admit. It feels nicer to think of the world, "at least animals are nice". This is why I avoid watching the news. I've not seen footage of 9/11 victims jumping out of windows, or as little as possible of tsunami victims mourning their dead, too much to bear. Let's all hold hands and light a candle instead.

People have always moaned about the world in this fashion - all the way back to Juvenal - a Greek chap who moaned about all the same things 2000 yrs ago. The world is a great place, you just need to ignore the hype. News is an industry and has its own motivations, needs etc. People have been dying in natural disaters and wars forever, it's just that we never heard about it until the Global Media. What you don't know can't hurt you. What you can't change you don't need to hear about.

I think the brain is pre-programmed to look for something different. It's probably a survival instinct, if something new comes along it requires extra attention until it's been classified. Nowadays we are continually bombarded by new stimuli and we find it hard to cope. We stop noticing how beautiful the countryside is and concentrate on the car stereo and daydream... to give our brains a break from the ubiquitous adverts and the stress of modern living. We daren't believe in magic because we fear it will make us too vulnerable... well, we daren't admit we do ;)

what I can't change is the pollution, and the way humankinds monstrous cities and roads are overtaking everything. What I can't abide is the decline of forests, animals becoming extinct, sacred ancient fields being made into landfill sites, ancient woodland being cut down to make landsites and ugly modern housing estates. And that noone can fight back, cause there isn't enough money too; and those that do are laughed at and called treehuggers. No this is not a beautiful world, cause we have made it ugly.

I think the 'magic' for most people nowdays, Smiley, is a 2005 Kia 4x4 petrol-guzzling SUV, a new plasma-screen telly on which to watch the latest crap reality show, and a new pair of trainers from Adidas. Most people don't realise how stressed they are; they're too busy buying shite from cosmetics/clothing/car/electronic appliance shops, hoping desperately that if they buy all of the above, they'll finally feel 'good' about themselves, like the advertising industry says they will. Not understanding, of course, that the whole purpose of advertising is to make you feel as shitty and ugly and inadequate -in and of your own self- as you possibly can. Hence buying their products as compensation for so-called 'flaws'.

A lot of people feel the same, Funky, a hell of a lot! It's criminal but it will not change so find what beauty you can and marvel. It used to really annoy me when my Socialist mates used to bang on about Communism and taking over the means of production - they just wanted a bigger share not to actually make things more 'green'. The world has become a greedy place and greed is deaf and blind to all but MORE.

Sorry, Ag, I wasn't ignoring you I just became a bit sad after reading Fateful's post and then Funky's. Yes, you are right. It's not a happy picture if you look past the glossy finish is it? Still, I'm a great believer that good always triumphs over evil in the end. I joked to a friend of mine the other day that maybe this is all just GOD'S WAY OF SHOWING LUCIFER HOW WRONG HE WAS. Now I don't expect many people to agree with that, and I don't care, but inevitably people will start to realise that trees mean fresh air as well as wood and that you can replace wood with plastic but you can't replace fresh air... Once you start to calculate everythings worth by how much you can sell it for you're already dead. Computers might think but they don't feel and there are far too many walking computers that don't realise they are dead.

Yeah the bits we haven't ruined are still beautiful. Yet it needs protecting, the sacredness of the land needs defending. I have a strong desire to stand up for these places. Have always loved animals and plants, more than the towns and cities of humans; if it meant coming down to war, and fighting people to protect the land, I would do it. I would fight the armies, police, security guards, whoever came to stop us defending the earth. Yeah they've got money, guns, cameras, sattelite and planes that drop bombs - but they haven't got any heart. If I had the power I would call up all the nature spirits and elementals to do battle against them, use the old ancient druid blood I have in me. All I need is an army, anyone up for it?

I find the whole industrial/consumerist routine sickening. Spend our weeks working longer and longer hours to produce alot of shit that we don't really need - half of which get's dumped in warehouses for months on end. Then we're let off the treadmill on a saturday and sunday to go and buy all the crap! hahaha. And the funny thing is - we get charged to park when we go buy it, lol.

I know I keep coming back to this, I meant to comment to yours on another thread Smiley, but it moved on before I could get to it. It's what monkeys do. Was it Jane Goodall that did the research on chimps in the wild? Or am I getting her mixed up. Anyway, when she went to research chimps she found that she couldn't get anywhere near them. After a while she started putting out food for them, to bring them to the camp so she could study them. After another while the chimps started to become violent, attacking each other unprovoked. Then the young males formed into gangs and started killing individual chimps. I believe a human child was also taken and killed. All because they wanted bananas. When they had to find their own food they were all equal. When someone introduced free food they became greedy. It's what monkeys (and people) do. What else do monkeys do?

Found this on Jane's UK Institute web site:- Jane Goodall is one of the World's most famous scientists. Her pioneering study of wild chimpanzees, begun over 40 years ago in Tanzania, revolutionised how we think about both chimpanzees and ourselves. Her research in Africa continues to this day and is the longest field study ever undertaken of any group of animals in the wild. Today, however, Jane combines her scientific work with international advocacy on behalf of chimps and the environment. Chimpanzees are our closest relatives in the animal kingdom. They are highly intelligent, social apes, found only in Africa. They share over 98% of their genetic material with us, communicate, and express many of the same emotions that we do. Sadly though, while the number of human beings inhabiting the planet continue to grow, chimpanzee numbers are falling. They are threatened by hunting, loss of forests and illegal capture. Many are still forced to lead miserable lives in squalid zoos or are kept confined in laboratories, the subjects of invasive medical experiments. We are working to prevent their extinction...

Of course we have to remember that when Jane Goodall began observing chimps in the 1960s, chimpanzees had already existed for about 7 million years, since the great schism that separated humans as a species from our simian relatives. Jane Goodall can record -observable- behaviour, e.g. that when she began giving them bananas their behaviour appeared to change. But really, there is little 'proof' that they didn't hunt, etc. for -quite- a long time before Janie got to the jungle. After all, they use 'tools' like termite sticks and leaf sponges, and this was not a consequence of the banana feeding, but an evolution of thinking within the species. I would dare to venture that the hunting of other lesser monkeys was also in this thread. Monkeys are omnivores; they have big, BIG canine teeth, and the instinct to hunt in strong even in humans (although now we 'hunt' for a wide-screen plasma telly ;-)). Of course giving wildlife food alters their behaviour: why work for a living if someone is willing to give you 100 quid a week for free? But these other behaviours have little to do with acquired anthropogenic activities, I feel...

It seems perhaps we agree in any case. Whether or not chimps learned greed from being given bananas, they are capable of antisocial and aggressive behaviour just like humans. To think they have been doing it for millions of years hardly makes me feel better about it! :-)

Hey guys, first off - apologies. I accidently took too many pills yesterday. Am supposed to be on 2 a day, but took 4 by mistake. (as took the dose twice forgetting I'd already taken it.) Anyway it seems to have made me go a bit manic and irrational. It made me go a bit nuts at work as well. Seems to have worn off now, thank god. There have been some good posts to this thread. Can't say much just now as the wain is hungry. Take care.

I think you should start a different thread for 'what is cool', Funky. This thread seems to have devoloped along the lines of what isn't cool. It isn't cool to see everything as a means to an end. The danger with science is the dispassionate way it can view the world: living things become mere biological systems which can be coldly experimented on, tortured, dissected, and mutated. I've touched before on LD50: In toxicology, the LD50 or colloquially semilethal dose of a particular substance is a measure of how much constitutes a lethal dose. In toxicological studies of substances, one test is to administer varying doses of the substance to populations of test animals; that dose administered which kills half the test population is referred to as the LD50, for "Lethal Dose, 50%". Some animal welfare groups (particularly those influenced by the animal liberation movement) object to the studies needed to calculate this figure. This is particularly the case where the substance is not particularly toxic and a large quantity of the material is ingested by the animals over a long period, in some cases causing slow, painful deaths. Another criticism of LD50 testing is that lethality in test animals does not always give an accurate indication of lethality in humans, because resistance varies from one species to another. Why we should kill large amounts of different animals just to find out how much canabis or cabbage is lethal seems totally pointless to me. The sort of games mad scientists play while they pull legs off spiders and explode frogs. That they do it to monkeys and apes is totally inexcuseable yet only illegal in New Zealand. Since they admit to experiments on fetuses etc. we can only guess at what else goes on behind the scenes... stemcell farms, nah.

On the other hand. Blue sky, blue sea, bluebells err... I seem a bit blue at the moment. Lots of reasons to be cheerful though. Spring is here and Summer follows happy days of sun and swallows (at least for Ely ;o)

Do you read Mills & Boon books, mykle?

Actually, burinsmith and Smiley, Jane Goodall also found that chimps hunt other 'lesser' monkeys in planned, strategised groups, where one chimp flushes the prey, another one trees it, and the rest gather around it to kill and eat it (sometimes still kicking and screaming). It had nothing to do with bananas. Nature is brutal by our namby-pamby standards, but we are also a part of nature, whatever we do to wreck it. It will get us in the end; if we don't kill ourselves off first, Nature will find a way to redress the balance...

Jane Goodall is based at Arizona State University. A local celebrity for us anthropology students studying in the Hot Dry State...

i reckon im the original 21st century person. I'm metro sexual, intelligent, into diectics and have a concience

dietics. Its only as boring as you want it to be. If your ever bored go in to an inner city and talk to the poor and homeless, give them words of hope and a smile, a bit of change. Why not ? *By unburdening your sister or brother you may find you unburden yourself and in doing so open the door to a million shades of happyness you never knew existed* 'You should never be bored in this short life or your not actually living, take yourself out of yesterday and out of your mistakes'

How about those smoking chimps? We're gonna have to ban smoking in banana trees sooner or later. *if you don't quit smoking, we're gonna lock ya up!"

Can I just say that I've found if I switch of the TV for a day - don't read the paper or even watch the news, the world around me seems much nicer.... The media interpretation of the world is a lot more in your face than the actual world. Everyday I make it my mission to make random strangers smile, and it is really nice. If I believed what I saw in the press/magazines I wouldn't bother. And I would think I was a fat, ugly slob who really didn't deserve to love/be loved or have a nice day.

But ferg, if you never watched the television or read the press, you'd never know if the weather report was accurate much less what sex Britney Spears bun is.

I know that - what I mean is that sometimes it is good to switch off. I'm not sure how magazines are in the US - but here there is this constant influx of 'Try this diet!' 'Be gorgeous like the stars!' blah blah blah. I know this affects people's psychology because even though my sister is a very good mum, has lots of friends, is funny and has a loving partner, she still worries and believes that if she had the body of Kylie Minogue she would be a better person. It's a shame. I happen to read the Independent everyday, the Guardian on a Saturday, and Now magazine on a Thursday (given to me by my sister). I also watch the Channel 4 news. I am also aware of the discrepency of life as I experience it, and life as publications describe it.

I think reading newspapers is a little different from passive-learning on telly, fergal. Although the papers tend to have their crap centre sections for what such-and-such star is doing or how much weight they've lost since their last film, this is much less prevalent or overt than on telly. I used to have a secret addiction to shite magazines like 'People' and 'Us' in the States, but decided to ban them as: a) who gives a rat's arse about Kylie Minogue (for example) and b) I got tired of comparing myself to Kylie Minogue (for example) and sadly finding myself lacking, which is also shite. It's terrible that people carve themselves up, go under the knife, and put themselves into major debt just to live up to 'someone's' preconceived notion of 'perfection'. Men are getting just as 'bad' as women for this lack of critical thinking. I decided to work on my self-esteem instead, which was much harder than just buying into the whole media thing, but infinitely more gratifying as well...

You know what - it's really true that in real life the people you'd really enjoy spending time with don't give a rat's arse how much you look like Kylie Minogue either.... that's what's so silly about those magazines. I love them, but only because I cannot bear to give up my throne as 'celebrity/entertainment phone a friend'. I like knowing stupid facts. No matter how thin/glossy/popular you are, you will still have insecurites and issues with yourself. In fact, most pyschology would prove that those celebs who have got themselves very thin/glossy have more hangups than most in the first place. I am amazed at the ammount of 'done up' men I see around the place - hair all gelled into high spikes, semi-mullets with dyed tips, everything 'just so'. For me, that has made me see how silly it is on women too. Although it is fun to dress up sometimes, it cannot be the fabric of life. Not my life anyway. As for newspapers I feel they often - though not always - promote the idea that our society is getting worse and worse, when in reality I think it's the opposite.