KickIdle.com Blog

I’ve never used any sort of illegal mind altering substance. I have never smoked a cigarette. I have never inhaled, snorted, shot, licked, or rubbed a chemical into my body that wasn’t perscription or over-the-counter. This strikes some of my friends as odd, althought I’ve never really given it much thought. But while driving to Morgantown with some friends today, I realized just why it is I don’t do the whole mind-bending thing.
As I mentioned before, reality exists regardless of what I think of it. So to me, it’s a waste of time to bend my perception of reality. Relaxing with pot, or a cigarette, or tripping on acid all hamper my fundamental tool for dealing with reality – my perception. And if that’s impaired, then I can’t do anything productive.
Ironically, I do drink alcohol on occasion. But it’s almost always in great moderation, so I guess it’s somehow excusable. Of course, that may just be me rationalizing too.

So, while generally being interested in philosophy and while specifically reading Julius X’s page of banter, I was struck by what is one my deepest convictions.
Reality exists in an objective form independent of conciousness.
There’s all sorts of consequences of that belief, and I’m still hashing some of them out. I’ll post some more as my thoughts progress, but for now I’ve got to get going – meeting some friends for the afternoon.

Looks like PGP won’t die a slow death after all. When NAI closed down further development and support for PGP, things looked gloomy, but now PGP Corp. has bought PGP from NAI and is planning on releasing version 8.0 in November.

The Freedom Forum has an article about the recent State of the First Amendment survey. Apparently, a very large percentage of people out there think that the First Amendment is too broad and is getting in the way of the government’s “War on Terror”. I think this ties into the previous post nicely, especially when you consider the response rates on some of the questions:

• “For the first time in the annual State of the First Amendment survey, almost half (49%) of those surveyed said the First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees…”
• “The percentages of those responding who were able to identify individual freedoms:
  • 58% — freedom of speech
  • 18% — freedom of religion
  • 14% — freedom of the press
  • 10% — freedom of assembly/association
  • 2% — freedom of petition”

Now, unless I read that wrong, only 58% of people knew the First Amendment guarantees the right to free speech, but 49% of those polled thought the First Amendment goes too far. It doesn’t take a professional statistician to guess that a pretty damn large chunk of the people who are calling for the rewrite of the First Amendment don’t even know what the one we have now says. And the fact that only 18% of people know about the freedom of religion doesn’t make me sleep any easier.
It’s this type of complete and utter stupidity that makes me wonder if and how American society is going to survive.

Here’s something that the neophiles amoung my readers will have no doubt already seen. Researchers at Cornell have concluded that people who are clueless about how to do something are probably also clueless as to their own stupidity. I can’t say that I’m suprised.